Sometimes we just want a pretty graph for Cloudwatch monitoring on Grafana. Working with Terraform it’s now great to set up a basic block to auto create this. This is the way I did it

Terraform Setup

• Set up a new feature in variables.tf

variable "features" {
  description = "Features to enable (true/false mostly)"
  type = object({
    grafana = optional(bool, true)  # Enable IAM setup for Grafana
  })
}

• Set up a new features-grafana.tf file to hold the new block.
  The user created is hardcoded as “grafana” and the Access Key and Secret Key is forced to screen ( you can hide it as per code)

##### Feature: Grafana
## Sets up user/permissions for use with Grafana externally with ReadOnly CloudWatch metrics
# Output:
# * Defines user as "grafana"
# * access/secret key to put into Grafana DataSource
#### Grafana IAM user
resource "aws_iam_user" "grafana" {
  count = lookup(var.features, "grafana") == true ? 1 : 0
  name  = "grafana"
}

resource "aws_iam_access_key" "grafana" {
  count = lookup(var.features, "grafana") == true ? 1 : 0
  user  = aws_iam_user.grafana[0].name
}

resource "aws_iam_user_policy_attachment" "grafana" {
  count      = lookup(var.features, "grafana") == true ? 1 : 0
  user       = aws_iam_user.grafana[0].name
  policy_arn = "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/CloudWatchReadOnlyAccess"
}

output "grafana_iam_access_key" {
   value = lookup(var.features, "grafana") == true ? aws_iam_access_key.grafana[0].id : null 
}

output "grafana_iam_secret_key" {
   value     = lookup(var.features, "grafana") == true ? nonsensitive(aws_iam_access_key.grafana[0].secret) : null
#   sensitive = true
}

• Run it up

terraform apply

Grafana Setup

Log into Grafana (10.0.1 is what I’m using)

• (Left side) Connections > Add new connections
• CloudWatch (Plugin 5.0.0 at time of writing)
• “Create a CloudWatch data source” (top right)
• Fill in form – with 2 values outputted above
  Name = “CloudWatch”
  Authentication Provider = “Access & secret key”
  Access Key ID = {grafana_iam_access_key}
  Secret Access Key = {grafana_iam_secret_key}
• Save & Test (bottom)

Now to set up some cool graphs as required 😉