Scale AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews with the new Consolidated Report

AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews help you improve your workload‘s architecture by identifying risks that require attention across the six pillars of the framework. However, after identifying the risks in your architecture, you need to prioritize them and create an improvement strategy to address them. Using Consolidated Report, a new feature added recently to AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool), you can scale improvements across your workloads by identifying which improvements apply to multiple workloads.

Also, you can leverage the Consolidated Report to get a comprehensive view of risk patterns across all your workloads, enabling you to identify critical areas for improvement and prioritize remediation efforts. This will not only enhance your efficiency but also facilitate the implementation of best practices across your organization. In addition, the AWS WA Tool features a new Enhanced Search capability that empowers you to locate your workloads more efficiently using a broader range of search terms.

In this blog post, you will learn how the new Consolidated Report in the AWS WA Tool helps you create unified insights based on the medium and high risk issues for each workload within your account. Also, you will learn how Consolidated Report offers cross-team visibility, particularly for leadership, by highlighting critical issues and expediting the implementation of improvement plans.

The following screenshot of the Consolidated Report Dashboard shows the total number of workloads, as well the number of workloads with high and medium risk issues, across the Well-Architected Tool Lenses and all other lenses within your AWS account.

Well-Architected Framework issues per Pillar:

The Consolidated Report provides improved visibility of high and medium risk issues across your workloads. By grouping issues by pillar, you can view a graphical representation of such issues for all workloads. Sometimes your organization might be interested in showing issues specific to a single pillar, like Security or Reliability. The information is displayed in a bar graph, making it easier to identify possible issues that may require further attention.

In the following screenshot, you can see an example of the Reliability Pillar, showing the total number of high and medium risk issues identified in that Pillar across all workloads in your account.

Well-Architected Framework issues per workload:

Sometimes, you may want to view issues per workload then share findings with the team who owns that workload. By grouping issues per workload, you can show all issues for that workload, which allows you to identify areas that may require further attention. The following screenshot shows how you can view detailed information using Consolidated Report, and how you can view information across all workloads, helping identify risk trends and target areas for improvement.

Well-Architected Framework issues by improvement plan item:

Customers have expressed a need to identify improvements to implement across multiple workloads without the manual task of comparing individual improvement items. With this section of the Consolidated Report, you have access to all the improvement plan items for all of your workloads, which helps you save time and effort.

For example, you can filter by the high risk issues identified on the Reliability Pillar as shown in the following screenshot.

The following screenshot shows you how the Consolidated Report offers an extended view in “Improvement item”, which summarizes the workloads associated with each Improvement item. This allows you to prioritize and address any identified risks or areas for improvement across all of your workloads. With this ability, your teams and stakeholders can now collaborate and communicate more effectively, and ultimately scale the workload improvement process.

Exporting all the information:

The AWS WA Tool allows you to export all the information generated by the Consolidated Report to a single PDF file. This is especially beneficial as it allows you to share the information with various stakeholders, including executives and other teams, enabling better collaboration and informed decision-making. This ability makes it easier to refer to previous reports, and track changes, for better document retention and archival purposes. You can also export all the information of the report using the Well-Architected APIs.

Enhanced Search:

The AWS WA Tool offers a new Enhanced Search capability, which enables you to find your workloads more efficiently, using a wider variety of search terms. New search parameters include workload name, ID, or Amazon Resource Names (ARNs).

The screenshot below shows the search bar at the top-left of the screen and how to enter the new search parameters:

Conclusion:

The Consolidated Report in the AWS WA Tool enables you to visualize risks and scale improvements across all workloads within your account. It summarizes individual workload improvement plans, identifies applicable improvements across multiple workloads, optimizes resource utilization, and offers a more efficient way to manage workloads.

The new Enhanced Search capability within the AWS WA Tool facilitates efficient workload discovery with additional search criteria that enables you to use a broader range of search terms, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of workload discovery.

With the new Consolidated Report you can better identify and prioritize issues, as well as scale your workload management processes.

Check out the Consolidated Report documentation today and see how the AWS WA Tool can help you improve your workloads.

About the authors: