Centralize observability with Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins

Observability is a critical aspect for maintaining the health and performance of any distributed system. Organizations rely on data from diverse sources, including AWS services as well as third-party ISVs (independent software vendor) to gain insights into their system’s health. Establishing secure connections to these diverse data sources enables visualization and analysis of observability data in a single pane of glass view, driving data-driven decision making.

Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service for Grafana, a popular open-source analytics platform that enables you to query, visualize, and alert on data from a wide variety of data sources. Grafana offers an extensible architecture, with plugins that can be used to enhance user experience with a wide range of functionalities such as querying data from external data sources for better insights and improved visualizations. Enterprise plugins are exclusive data source plugins, built and maintained by Grafana Labs, connecting to proprietary tools or platforms, such as Splunk, Dynatrace, or Databricks. Enterprise plugins provide simplified user experiences, enabling you to query these systems alongside AWS services within a Grafana dashboard. For example, you could correlate your Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) performance metrics from Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, application logs and traces from Amazon OpenSearch Service with your incidents in ServiceNow for effective troubleshooting.

With Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins, you can upgrade your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace to access third-party enterprise data source plugins, directly from the Amazon Managed Grafana console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDK. An Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins license costs an additional $45 per active user per workspace, and this gives you access to support and on-demand training directly from Grafana Labs, in addition to all the Enterprise plugins listed in Enterprise data sources available with Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins. With the pay-as-you-go pricing model, Enterprise plugins upgrade have no upfront fees or minimum commitments, you will pay only for what you use, based on an active user per workspace. You can easily identify the monthly usage and costs of using Enterprise plugins with the consolidated billing report.

Unified observability experiences in a hybrid environment

The architecture diagram below shows one of customer’s environments, utilizing Amazon Managed Grafana to visualize data from AWS as well as third party Enterprise data sources.

Access Enterprise plugins

You can enable access to Enterprise plugins from the Amazon Managed Grafana console. When you create a new workspace, by default it does not have access to Enterprise plugins however, you can upgrade at any time. To enable Enterprise plugins in your Grafana workspace, refer Managing your access to Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins.

With Enterprise Plugins upgrade, you get access to Grafana Labs consulting and support services. To enable this, your AWS account must be linked with a Grafana Labs account token. Linking consists of getting a token from a Grafana Labs account that is used in Amazon Managed Grafana to register the account. To create a Grafana token, refer Link your account with Grafana Labs.

The architecture diagram below shows how to manage your Enterprise plugin license.

To automate your Enterprise plugins management, you can also use AWS CLI, or Amazon Managed Grafana API. You must use `ENTERPRISE` for the `licenseType`, and pass in a valid Grafana Labs token for the `grafana-token`.

Using Amazon Managed Grafana API

POST /workspaces/<workspace-id>/licenses/ENTERPRISE?Grafana-Token=<grafana-token> HTTP/1.1

Using AWS CLI

aws grafana associate-license \
--region <region> \
--workspace-id <workspace-id> \
--license-type ENTERPRISE \
--grafana-token <grafana-token>

Switch from AWS Marketplace Grafana Enterprise license to Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins

To switch from AWS Marketplace Grafana Enterprise license to Amazon Managed Grafana Enterprise plugins, simply cancel your subscription from AWS Marketplace and upgrade from your Amazon Managed Grafana console. Your data source configurations will stay as it is after you complete the upgrade in Amazon Managed Grafana console. For frequently asked questions, refer FAQ for AWS Marketplace Enterprise users.

Data transfer cost when Enterprise plugins is enabled

Just like connecting to other AWS managed services in the same region, there is no data transfer cost when you connect, query, or alert on the enterprise data sources that are connected to your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace. However, if your enterprise data sources are required to be routed from an external network through your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) prior to the connection to the Amazon Managed Grafana workspace using the VPC connection configuration, then standard data transfer costs will be applied between AWS and the external network. Data transfer cost for common architectures can be found in the blog Overview of Data Transfer Costs for Common Architectures.

Conclusion

Amazon Managed Grafana enables you to query, visualize, and alert on your metrics, logs, and traces from AWS data sources and third-party enterprise data sources in one single pane of glass. Check out the Amazon Managed Grafana user guide for detailed documentation. To learn more about Amazon Managed Grafana and the upgrade option, visit the product page and pricing page.

• Check out One Observability Workshop aimed at providing a hands-on experience for you on the wide variety of toolsets AWS offers to setup monitoring and observability on your applications.
• Refer best practices for AWS Observability to learn more about prescriptive guidance and recommendations with implementation examples.
• If you are a Terraform shop, check out AWS Observability accelerator for Terraform which is a set of Terraform modules to help you configure Observability for your workloads with AWS Observability services.
• Check out AWS Observability Accelerator for CDK which is a set of opinionated modules to help you set up observability for your AWS environments.

We are here to help and if you need further assistance, reach out to AWS Support and your AWS account team.

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