One-Click vs Manual AWS Integration

SigNoz offers two ways to monitor your AWS infrastructure. This guide helps you choose the right approach.

Quick Comparison

One-Click Integration

Get Started

See the One-Click AWS Integrations Guide for setup instructions.

How It Works

1. Connect AWS Account: Deploy a CloudFormation stack that creates necessary IAM roles
2. Auto-Discovery: SigNoz automatically discovers your AWS resources
3. CloudWatch Integration: Metrics and logs are streamed via CloudWatch Metric Streams and Firehose
4. Pre-built Dashboards: Dashboards are automatically imported for each service

Supported Services

• EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda
• RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
• ALB, API Gateway
• MSK, SQS, SNS
• S3 (via S3 Sync)

AWS Cost Considerations

Actual AWS bills depend heavily on number of metrics, resolution, enabled logs, and region. Use AWS Pricing Calculator for exact estimates. View AWS pricing docs.

Manual Setup (OpenTelemetry)

How It Works

Deploy OpenTelemetry Collectors to collect metrics and logs directly from your AWS resources. This approach works with both SigNoz Cloud and Self-Hosted deployments.

Collection Methods

1. OTel Collection Agents (Recommended for ECS/EKS)

Deploy collectors as sidecars or DaemonSets to collect infrastructure metrics and application telemetry.

• ECS EC2: OTel Collector for ECS EC2
• ECS Serverless: OTel Collector for ECS Serverless
• EKS/K8s: OTel Collector for K8s
• EKS Fargate: OTel Collector for EKS Fargate

2. CloudWatch Receiver (Logs Only)

Use the awscloudwatch receiver to poll for CloudWatch logs directly.

Note: This receiver does not collect metrics.

receivers:
  awscloudwatch:
    region: us-east-1
    logs:
      poll_interval: 1m
      groups:
        named:
          /aws/lambda/my-function:

See Send CloudWatch Logs to SigNoz for full configuration.

3. S3 Lambda Forwarder (Log Files in S3)

For services that export logs to S3, deploy a Lambda function to forward logs to SigNoz.

See individual service docs for specific configurations:

• ELB Logs
• VPC Flow Logs
• RDS Logs
• S3 Access Logs

4. AWS Service Metrics (Manual via CloudWatch Exporter)

For AWS services where metrics are only available via CloudWatch (RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc.), you can manually set up the CloudWatch Exporter if you are not using One-Click Metric Streams.

See the "Manual Setup" tab in each service guide for the specific YAML configuration:

• API Gateway
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• ELB Metrics
• Lambda
• MSK
• RDS
• SQS
• SNS

5. Lambda OTel Layers (Lambda Traces & Logs)

For AWS Lambda, use OpenTelemetry Lambda layers to auto-instrument your functions and send traces/logs directly to SigNoz.

How it works:

1. Add the language-specific OTel auto-instrumentation layer (Python, Node.js, Java, Ruby)
2. Add the OTel Collector layer to forward telemetry
3. Configure environment variables to point to SigNoz

# Example layer ARNs (replace <region> with your AWS region)
# Python auto-instrumentation
arn:aws:lambda:<region>:184161586896:layer:opentelemetry-python-0_11_0:1

# OTel Collector (x86_64)
arn:aws:lambda:<region>:184161586896:layer:opentelemetry-collector-amd64-0_12_0:1

See the detailed guides:

• Lambda Logs - S3-based log forwarding
• Lambda Traces - OTel auto-instrumentation with layers

AWS Cost Considerations

Manual setup minimizes AWS costs:

When to Choose Manual

• You're using Self-Hosted SigNoz
• You need fine-grained control over what's collected
• You want to minimize AWS costs
• You need custom processing (filtering, transforming data)

Hybrid Approach

You can combine both methods:

1. Use One-Click for critical services where pre-built dashboards save time
2. Use Manual for services where you need custom collection or cost control

The data from both methods flows into the same SigNoz instance and can be queried together.