Amazon Web Services Inc. late Tuesday announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Grafana, an observability service designed to help enterprises monitor their infrastructure and applications for technical issues.

The service is a managed implementation of the open-source Grafana observability platform. AWS has built it in collaboration with the open-source platform’s developer, startup Grafana Labs Inc., which last month raised funding at a $3 billion valuation.

Companies find technical issues in their applications by analyzing three types of troubleshooting data: logs, metrics and traces. Logs describe specific events, such as a server outage, while metrics describe trends that unfold over time, such as when application latency suddenly increases from one week to the next. Traces, the third type of data commonly used to analyze technical issues, provide insight into what specific subcomponent of an application is causing a technical issue. 

Amazon Managed Grafana can analyze all three types of data. The service turns the raw technical information into graphs and notifications that help administrators identify application issues quickly. Also included are data analytics features that make it possible to uncover the root cause of a technical problem and find the best way of fixing it. 

The visualization and analytics capabilities have been brought over from the open-source version of Grafana. According to AWS, the advantage of Amazon Managed Grafana over the open-source version is that it’s considerably easier to use.

AWS customers previously had to set up Grafana deployments in their cloud instances manually, which is often a time-consuming process. With Amazon Managed Grafana, a company can avoid the initial setup process and create a deployment in a few minutes. The service also automatically performs maintenance tasks such as provisioning more storage capacity when the amount of troubleshooting data an enterprise is processing increases.

The second major benefit AWS promises besides ease of use is streamlined cybersecurity. Amazon Managed Grafana encrypts customers’ data and automatically applies security patches to customers’ Grafana deployments. The service additionally provides integrations with other AWS services that companies can use to further reduce the risk of a data leak. Administrators can harness AWS IAM to manage user logs and AWS CloudTrail to monitor attempts to modify their Grafana deployments.

“AWS customers love the highly interactive dashboards they are able to create using Grafana but don’t want to deal with the added operational complexity of managing their own Grafana servers,” said Nandini Ramani, vice president of monitoring and observability at AWS. “Now, customers can spend less time managing their Grafana deployments and more time focused on building high-value applications and delivering a better experience to end users.”

Enterprises requiring more features can buy the commercial version of Grafana offered by Grafana Labs, the startup that maintains the open-source platform. They can then switch their Amazon Managed Grafana deployment to the commercial version with a few clicks. Customers gain access to additional capabilities such as plugins that make it easier to import data from external sources for analysis. 

Image: AWS