Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account cross-region dashboards
Amazon CloudWatch now includes cross-account cross-region dashboards, which enable you to create high level operational dashboards, and with one click, drill down into more specific dashboards in different AWS accounts without having to log in and out of different accounts or switch AWS Regions. It is intended for centralized operations teams, DevOps engineers, and service owners who need to monitor, troubleshoot, and analyze applications running in multiple regions and accounts. The ability to visualize, aggregate, and summarize performance and operational data across accounts and Regions helps reduce mean time to resolution.
With cross-account cross-region dashboards, you get centralized visibility of CloudWatch metrics, logs, and alarms across a group of related accounts without the overhead of having to centralize data. Likewise, you can visualize the health and performance of applications running in several Regions. You can also use CloudWatch metric math to aggregate and transform metrics from multiple accounts and Regions.
To get started, go to the CloudWatch settings in your account and enable the cross-account cross-region view. Then, in the settings of each account you are monitoring, enable sharing of your CloudWatch data and link your accounts when prompted. Once the view is enabled, you will see account and Region dropdown lists in your main CloudWatch console, and can use them to quickly view dashboards, metrics, and alarms in other accounts and Regions. In the metrics tab, you can find and add metrics from different accounts and Regions to a single graph, then aggregate the metrics using CloudWatch metric math. CloudWatch cross-account cross-region dashboards and sharing permissions can be created and managed using AWS CloudFormation and the AWS SDK and CLI.
CloudWatch cross-account cross-region dashboards are now available in all commercial AWS Regions. See how to create and use a CloudWatch Cross-Account Cross-Region dashboard with the AWS Management Console.