Monitor AWS EC2 Instance Using CloudWatch and Grafana

Monitoring EC2 instances is a basic but critical task for every DevOps engineer. AWS provides CloudWatch for collecting metrics, and Grafana makes visualisation simple and powerful.

In this blog, we will learn how to monitor an AWS EC2 instance using CloudWatch and Grafana, step by step, in a clean and practical way.

🧩 Architecture Overview

✅ Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:

• An AWS account

• A running EC2 instance

• IAM user with programmatic access

• Grafana installed (self-hosted or Grafana Cloud)

• AWS access key & secret key

  
  

Step 1: Enable CloudWatch Monitoring for EC2

By default, AWS sends basic monitoring metrics every 5 minutes.

To enable detailed monitoring (recommended):

1. Go to EC2 → Instances

2. Select your instance

3. Click Actions → Manange detailed monitoring

4. Enable Detailed monitoring

This enables:

• CPU Utilization

• Network In / Out

• Disk Read / Write

• Status Check metrics (1-minute interval)

Step 2: Create / Update IAM User Permissions

Grafana needs permission to read CloudWatch Metrics and Logs.

Attach the following policy to your IAM user:

✅ IAM Policy for Grafana (Recommended)

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "cloudwatch:GetMetricData",
        "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
        "cloudwatch:ListMetrics",
        "logs:DescribeLogGroups",
        "logs:DescribeLogStreams",
        "logs:GetLogEvents",
        "logs:FilterLogEvents",
        "ec2:DescribeInstances",
        "ec2:DescribeRegions",
        "tag:GetResources"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

📌 This policy allows:

• Reading EC2 metrics

• Reading CloudWatch logs

• Discovering EC2 instances

• Viewing tags (useful for filtering)

Step 3: Add CloudWatch as Data Source in Grafana

1. Login to Grafana

2. Go to Configuration → Data Sources

3. Click Add data source

4. Select CloudWatch

   
   

Configure as below:

Field	Value
Authentication Provider	Access & Secret Key
Access Key	Your AWS access key
Secret Key	Your AWS secret key
Default Region	ap-south-1 (or your region)
Assume Role ARN	Leave empty

Click Save & Test

✅ You should see:

Successfully queried the CloudWatch matrics API.

Step 4: Import EC2 Dashboard

Grafana provides ready-made dashboards for AWS EC2.

Import Dashboard

1. Go to Dashboards → Import

2. Enter Dashboard ID:

1860

3. Select:

   • Data source → CloudWatch

   • Region → Your AWS region

   • Instance → Your EC2 instance

4. Click Import

🎉 Result

You will now see a live dashboard showing:

• CPU Utilization

• Network In / Out

• Disk Read / Write

• Instance status checks

• EC2 health metrics

All updated in real time from CloudWatch.

Conclusion

By integrating AWS CloudWatch with Grafana, you can easily monitor EC2 performance metrics in real time using powerful and interactive dashboards. This setup helps you gain better visibility into system health, detect issues early, and improve overall infrastructure reliability with minimal effort.