Explore documentation
  1. Welcome to Telemetry 👋
  2. Quick start guide
  3. Wide events vs. time series
  4. Ingesting data
    1. Better Stack collector
    2. Vector
    3. OpenTelemetry
    4. Ingesting via HTTP API
    5. Ingesting metrics
    6. Ingesting logs
      1. Docker & Kubernetes
      2. Operating systems
      3. Log forwarders
      4. Programming languages
      5. Cloud platforms
        1. AWS
          1. Automated Integration
          2. Amazon CloudWatch
          3. Amazon ECS
          4. Amazon EKS
          5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing
          6. AWS Fargate
          7. AWS Lambda
          8. AWS Direct Connect
        2. Azure
        3. Cloudflare
        4. Google
        5. Digital Ocean
        6. Heroku
        7. Vercel
        8. Render
        9. Fly.io
      6. Web servers & Load balancers
      7. Databases & queues
      8. Storage
    7. Migrating to Better Stack
  5. Using the product
    1. AI SRE ↗
    2. MCP server ↗
    3. Transforming ingested data
    4. Querying data
    5. Tracing
    6. Alerts
  6. Telemetry API
    1. Getting an API token
    2. Sources API
    3. Source groups API
    4. Metrics API
    5. Connections API
    6. Query API ↗
  7. Alternative to
    1. Lightstep

Automated AWS Integration

Better Stack offers a deeply integrated experience with AWS, allowing you to seamlessly monitor your cloud infrastructure.

Deploy our prepared CloudFormation template into your AWS account to gain comprehensive observability. This integration provides:

  • Automatic ingestion of all CloudWatch metrics.
  • Detection and per-log-group optional ingestion of all CloudWatch log groups.
  • Automatic integration with CloudTrail to forward audit logs into Telemetry.
  • Automatic integration with AWS X-Ray; forward traces from AWS into Telemetry.

AWS Integration

1. Create a Source

Create a new AWS Source in Telemetry. You can use one source for all your regions (recommended for better cross-region trace correlation) or split your regions across different sources to vary retention/permissions.

2. Deploy the CloudFormation Stack

You will be presented with a button to "Deploy CloudFormation stack"; this will open the CloudFormation "Quick create stack" page from our template.

We set sensible defaults in the Quick create links, but there are four CloudFormation parameters you may wish to review:

  • CreateGlobalResources - (default true) - Create IAM roles. Set to false for secondary regions after the first.
  • EnableTagEnrichment - (default true) - Enable Lambda-based tag enrichment for metrics and logs. Data will still be forwarded to Telemetry without this, but the quality of the contextual information and metric tags will be lower.
  • EnableCloudTrail - (default true) - Create a new CloudTrail trail, and configure AWS to forward that new trail to CloudWatch, and then to Telemetry.
  • EnableXRayTransactionSearch - (default true) - Enable X-Ray Transaction Search to forward X-Ray data to CloudWatch, and then to Telemetry.

The full CloudFormation stack and Lambda definitions can be found in our GitHub repository.

3. Complete the Integration

Once the CloudFormation stack is deployed, enter the IntegrationRoleArn and ExternalId outputs from the deployment and press 'Save' to complete the integration.

We will now start loading your log groups.

Controlling Forwarded Logs

By default, all log groups are automatically subscribed to and forwarded to Telemetry. You can disable this behavior and select specific groups or sets of groups to forward by visiting Source → Configure and selecting the groups you wish to forward from the AWS log groups section.

Need help?

Please let us know at hello@betterstack.com.
We're happy to help! 🙏

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