Observability and visualisation

CloudWatch collects the data. The services in this section are about storing it at scale, searching it, and presenting it to the people who need to act on it. They overlap, so the useful question is which audience and which data each one is built for.

For operational dashboards, Amazon Managed Grafana is the usual starting point. It queries CloudWatch, Prometheus and many third-party sources from one interface. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is the metrics store for teams already instrumenting with Prometheus, particularly on Kubernetes.

OpenSearch is for full-text search and log analytics beyond what Logs Insights handles comfortably. QuickSight — now Amazon Quick Sight — is business intelligence rather than operations: reports and dashboards for people outside engineering.