> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.bronto.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Amazon CloudWatch Metrics

> Ingest Amazon CloudWatch service metrics into Bronto through CloudWatch Metric Streams and Amazon Data Firehose.

Amazon CloudWatch provides metrics for AWS services and resources, including EC2, RDS, Lambda, load balancers, and other managed services. Bronto ingests these metrics through a CloudWatch Metric Stream that uses the OpenTelemetry 1.0 output format and delivers to Bronto through Amazon Data Firehose.

## Recommended method

[**AWS Kinesis Firehose for CloudWatch Metrics**](./aws-firehose-cloudwatch-metrics) — create a CloudWatch Metric Stream, select the AWS metrics and namespaces you want to export, and use a Firehose HTTP destination to deliver the OpenTelemetry 1.0 payloads to Bronto.

This managed path is intended for metrics already available in CloudWatch. It requires no Lambda function and supports both Bronto EU and US environments.

<Note>
  Metrics ingestion is in public beta. Bronto supports sums, gauges, summaries, and explicit histograms. Exponential histograms are not supported, and the Metric Explorer does not currently provide a Rate function.
</Note>

## Application and infrastructure metrics

For application-instrumented metrics or infrastructure metrics collected directly from hosts and containers, use [ADOT](./aws-adot) or a [Self-Managed OpenTelemetry Collector](./aws-custom-otel). These options can send logs, metrics, and traces together and avoid routing workload telemetry through CloudWatch.

See [Host Metrics](/integrations/host-metrics) and the [OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib receivers](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/receiver) for supported infrastructure sources.

## Verify metrics

After the selected CloudWatch namespaces emit data, open **Metric Explorer** in Bronto and select a recently emitted AWS metric. Confirm that the expected AWS dimensions, timestamp, and any optional Bronto tags are present.

## Further reading

* [AWS Kinesis Firehose for CloudWatch Metrics](./aws-firehose-cloudwatch-metrics)
* [Amazon CloudWatch metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html)
* [Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Metric-Streams.html)
* [OpenTelemetry metrics concepts](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/metrics/)
* [Send Metrics to Bronto](/metrics/send-metrics)

See [Ingesting AWS Data into Bronto](./aws-overview) for the full service-to-method mapping.