Connect to AWS with Splunk-managed Metric Streams

Use guided setup to connect Splunk Observability Cloud to AWS through CloudWatch using Metric Streams.

If you have Administrator privileges for Splunk Observability Cloud and your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, you can use the UI guided setup to create an integration to connect to AWS and configure metric collection.

Before you start

Before you proceed, check AWS authentication, permissions, and supported regions and Connect AWS to Splunk Observability Cloud for information on data collection intervals and costs.

For alternative connection methods, see:

Use the guided setup to connect to AWS

To access the guided setup for the AWS integration, perform the following steps:

  1. Log in to Splunk Observability Cloud.

  2. Open the Amazon Web Services guided setup . Optionally, you can navigate to the guided setup on your own:

    • On the navigation menu, select Data Management.

    • Go to the Available integrations tab, or select Add Integration in the Deployed integrations tab.

    • Select the tile for Amazon Web Services.

  3. Next, follow the steps provided in the guided setup:

Define your AWS connection

In this step, choose the following connection options:

In the CloudWatch metrics option, select Streaming (Splunk-managed) as the ingestion method. When you activate Metric Streams, make sure you add these additional permissions to your IAM policy. See Permissions for Splunk-managed Metric Streams.

Note: To collect logs, see Send AWS logs to Splunk Platform.

Kinesis Firehose connection options

To create Kinesis Firehose and other resources required to connect to AWS using Splunk-managed Metric Streams, you can use one of the following options:

Prepare your AWS account

In this step, switch to your AWS Console to prepare for authentication.

On this screen, Splunk Observability Cloud gives you the AWS IAM policy JSON snippet, your Splunk Observability Cloud account ID, and your External ID, which you need to define your authentication policies in the console.

See more details in Authenticate in AWS using an External ID (recommended).

Establish the connection

Finally, proceed with the last steps:

  1. Complete your authentication configuration as prompted.
  2. Select your data sources:

    • AWS Regions

    • Built-in and custom services

Note: Select All built-in services to import all data from built-in CloudWatch namespaces and ensure that built-in dashboards display automatically.

Review the default settings

After creating an AWS IAM policy and assigning it to a particular role through the guided setup, you can modify your configuration.

Modify the scope of data collection

By default Splunk Observability Cloud brings in data from all supported AWS services associated with your account with certain limitations. See Connect AWS to Splunk Observability Cloud and Available Amazon Web Services integrations for details. Splunk Observability Cloud also brings in 5 default stats per service: SampleCount (count in Splunk Observability Cloud), Average (mean), Sum (sum), Minimum (lower), and Maximum (upper).

Use the check box options in the guided setup to limit the scope of your data collection. These are the available options:

  • Collect Amazon Cost and Usage Metrics.

  • Ingest CloudWatch Metrics. You can deactivate it altogether, or deactivate the polling but activate AWS Metric Streams instead.

  • Select which AWS regions to fetch data from. See Supported AWS regions.

  • Select which AWS services to fetch data from.

To limit data collection, you can also do the following:

  • Manage the amount of data to import. See Control the data and metadata to import.

  • In the Data Management menu in Splunk Observability Cloud, edit any integration to limit data import.

    Screenshot of integrations available to edit

  • Use the AWS console to revise the contents of the Action and Resource fields.

Select a CloudFormation template

Select a CloudFormation template to collect Metric Streams for each AWS region that you want to operate in. See Available CloudFormation and Terraform templates.

Next steps

After you connect Splunk Observability Cloud with AWS, you can use Splunk Observability Cloud to track a series of metrics and analyze your AWS data in real time.