Are there cheaper alternatives to cloud watch logs for creating dash boards?
Grafana was not really built to view logs from the get go.

They however introduced this feature in v6.0 via the Explore tab

This can be leveraged in 2 ways.

Via Elasticsearch data source (in v6.3+)

Check the Elasticsearch docs for more. 

If you want, you can still integrate this with Cloudwatch. Check out the log subscirber-consumer solution &amp; this

Via Loki &amp; AWS Lambda

If you want to stick to Cloudwatch as your primary source of logs, you can create a Lambda function that ships them to Loki which in tern can be used in Grafana as a data source. See 1, 2 &amp; 3