AWS Launches Managed Services for Grafana, Prometheus

Grafana Labs, developer of a popular open source tool for visualizing logs and metrics, joins a growing list of Amazon Web Services partners, allowing AWS customer to run Grafana’s dashboards natively as a managed service.

In a related move, AWS also this week unveiled a managed service for Prometheus, the machine data storage and monitoring platform for cloud-native deployments. The Prometheus cloud service is built on Cortex, the open source monitoring system launched by Grafana Labs last spring.

Grafana Labs said Tuesday (Dec. 15) the pair of new managed services complement one another, and the integration with Cortex would help users run Prometheus at scale.

The stable version of Cortex released in the spring allows enterprise customers to query metrics from Prometheus servers in a single place, eliminating gaps in graphs due to a server failure.

The partnership would also allow users to run Grafana operational dashboards alongside other AWS services.

The managed service for Grafana helps combine data and monitor sources though plugins for a range of data warehouses, machine learning operations and other tools, including Datadog, MongoDB, Oracle, Snowflake and Splunk.

AWS said its Grafana managed service includes secure data visualization for querying and correlating operational metrics, logs and traces across AWS as well as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Grafana Labs recently launched an enterprise version of Cortex designed as a Prometheus service running on-premise.

The Prometheus managed service launched in preview mode is positioned by the public cloud leader (NASDAQ: AMZN) as suited to time-series data gleaned from application containers. Along with its container service, the preview version of Prometheus includes support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

The service also monitors Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud or on-premise.

“A lot of challenges arise when monitoring container-based applications,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, noted in a blog post announcing the Prometheus service.

“This means that there are lots of unique values, which can make it harder to define a space-efficient storage model and to create queries that return meaningful results,” Barr added. Moreover, complex container platforms also must ingest, process and store monitoring data, the company said.

The AWS managed services are the latest iterations of the Prometheus and Grafana stack that has been deployed on-premise and in different cloud configurations. The new AWS managed services underscore the popularity of the Grafana-Prometheus combination as more enterprises use it to monitor mission-critical applications.

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