Rocketgraph shows your EC2 fleet without an agent on any instance. A CloudFormation stack creates a CloudWatch Metric Stream in your account that pushes metrics to your Rocketgraph ingress. No long-lived AWS credentials leave your account — Firehose assumes an IAM role you own.

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Connect

Open Integrations → AWS in the dashboard and click Connect AWS. The quick-create link is prefilled with your ingress endpoint and API key, so the only thing you choose is the region.
Delivery goes to the /firehose path, not the plain OTLP /v1/metrics path. Firehose wraps records in its own envelope, so it needs the Firehose receiver rather than the OTLP one.
The stack streams the AWS/EC2 namespace by default. MetricNamespaces is a comma-delimited parameter, so you can add AWS/RDS, AWS/ApplicationELB and others later without changing anything on the Rocketgraph side.

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What the fleet view shows

The hexagon grid on Infrastructure → AWS is built from two CloudWatch metrics: Instances are grouped by the InstanceId dimension; region comes from the cloud.region resource attribute. Only instances that reported in the last 15 minutes appear.

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Health states

idle is a cost signal rather than a fault — it is the state to look for when hunting instances nobody needs any more.
There is no sample or preview data. Until a stream is connected the fleet is empty rather than populated with placeholders.

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Known limits

The metric stream carries only the InstanceId dimension — no availability zone and no instance type. Every instance is labelled EC2 and the grid groups by region only. Getting AZ and type requires either extra CloudWatch dimensions or an ec2:DescribeInstances call, neither of which the agentless stream makes today.
  • Names are instance ids. Name tags are not carried in the stream.
  • Uptime is a proxy — how long Rocketgraph has observed the instance, not its real launch time. Reconnecting the stream resets it.
  • Metric streams do not cross regions. An account spanning us-east-1 and us-east-2 needs the stack deployed once in each, or instances in the missing region never appear.

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Troubleshooting

Nothing after 15 minutes. Check the Firehose delivery stream in the AWS console for delivery errors. Firehose retries for 60 seconds, then writes the record to the S3 backup bucket the stack created. Objects piling up in the backup bucket means delivery is failing, not that metrics are missing. The object body carries the HTTP response from the ingress — a 401 there means the API key parameter is wrong. The bucket expires objects after 7 days, so debug while the evidence still exists. Some instances missing. Confirm the stack is deployed in that instance’s region, and that the instance has been running long enough to emit a CloudWatch sample.

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Beyond metrics

CloudWatch gives you the managed view. For traces and logs from applications running on those instances, instrument the app and send OTLP — see AWS for ECS, Fargate, Lambda and EC2 collector setup.