Grafana Cloud's Cloud Provider Observability offers prebuilt dashboards and drill-down views for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, providing everything from service overviews to instance-level insights. While these out-of-the-box views are powerful, you may already have trusted dashboards, need a layout that matches your team's workflow, or want to adjust the panels shown when drilling into a single instance. The good news is that you can now customize all of this without leaving the application. This article explores three approaches to make service views your own: connecting an existing dashboard, creating one with AI and linking it, and editing the instance drill-down views used across Cloud Provider Observability, Database Observability, the entity graph, and more.
The Benefits of Customization
With the new customization features, you gain three key capabilities:
- Quick Links and Default Dashboard: Whatever you set on the Configure page (either the preconfigured view or a custom dashboard as default) is what users see when they open that service from the Services tab, entity graph, or other entry points. Custom dashboards you add become additional quick links.
- Instance Drill-Down: The panels and queries you configure under "Customize the panels…" appear exactly in the instance-level view wherever that view is used—Cloud Provider Observability, Database Observability, entity graph, etc.
- AI-Generated Dashboards: Created with the appropriate variables and methodology, then added like any other custom dashboard and optionally set as default, so they integrate into the same workflows and debugging paths.
These options let you keep using the premade views where they work, plug in your own or AI-generated dashboards as an alternative "front door," and tailor the per-instance drill-down so the same view is consistent across all observability surfaces.
One Place to Customize: The Configure Page
Customization for a given cloud service (e.g., Amazon RDS, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Virtual Machines) is managed on that service's Configure page. To access it, go to the Services tab and click Configure for the desired service. There you'll find:
- Preconfigured dashboard: The built-in, out-of-the-box view for that service.
- Custom dashboards: Dashboards you've added as quick links, with one marked as default.
- Explore-style links for metrics and Grafana Metrics Drilldown.
Everything you add or change here is saved per service and reused wherever that service appears in Grafana (Services, entity graph, Database Observability, etc.).
Three Ways to Customize
1. Connect an Existing Dashboard
If you already have a dashboard that fits a service—like your internal RDS or Lambda view—you can attach it as a quick link and optionally make it the default view for that service. On the Configure page, find the section labeled "Customize your quick links and add new ones to your custom dashboards." Click Select a dashboard, choose the one you want, and then you can set it as the default by clicking the star icon. The dashboard will now appear as a quick link when users open that service, and if set as default, it will be the first view shown.
2. Create a New Dashboard with AI
Grafana's AI capabilities allow you to generate custom dashboards tailored to your needs. Use the AI dashboard generator to create a new dashboard with the right variables and methodology (e.g., focus on specific metrics or regions). Once created, navigate back to the Configure page for the relevant cloud service. Under the same section for custom dashboards, add your AI-generated dashboard as a quick link. You can also designate it as the default. This ensures that the AI-created dashboard fits seamlessly into your existing workflows and debugging paths, providing a customized "front door" for that service.
3. Edit Instance Drill-Down Views
Instance drill-down views appear when you click on a specific resource (e.g., a single EC2 instance or RDS database) from the Services tab, entity graph, Database Observability, or other surfaces. To customize these, go to the Configure page for the service and locate the section titled "Customize the panels for instance view." Here you can add, remove, or rearrange panels, modify queries, and change visualizations. The changes you make are applied automatically everywhere that instance view is used—so whether you access the drill-down from Cloud Provider Observability or the entity graph, you'll see the same tailored panels. This ensures consistency across your observability environment.
Consistency Across Observability Surfaces
A key advantage of this customization system is that once you configure a service's views on the Configure page, those settings propagate to all entry points in Grafana. For example, if you customize the instance drill-down for Amazon RDS, that same drill-down will appear when you navigate from Database Observability, the entity graph, or any other surface that references an RDS instance. Similarly, default dashboards set as quick links will be the first thing users see when opening a service, whether from the Services tab or from a search result. This unified approach reduces duplication of effort and ensures a coherent experience for your team.
By leveraging these customization options—connecting existing dashboards, using AI-generated ones, and editing drill-down views—you can transform Cloud Provider Observability into a tool that precisely matches your operational needs. Start exploring the Configure pages for your cloud services today to streamline your monitoring workflows.