AWS metric ingestion for less: Save money and get near real-time stream into Grafana Cloud

A new method for ingesting AWS metrics into Grafana Cloud offers a more cost-effective, easier, and accurate solution by integrating Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Data Firehose for near real-time streaming. This push-based approach, using CloudWatch Metric Streams, is at least five times more cost-effective than traditional pull-based methods due to reduced operational costs and less reliance on API calls. The integration allows metrics to be processed and alerted on promptly, with higher granularity and the ability to enrich metrics with AWS resource metadata. The new method can coexist with the older scrape job setup, allowing gradual migration and ensuring continuous functionality of dashboards and alerts. Future enhancements are planned to further customize the metrics ingest experience, and the solution has expanded its observability offerings to other cloud providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Grafana Cloud aims to simplify the monitoring process with a range of plans, including a free tier.