Amazon CloudWatch Launches Search Expressions

Posted on: Apr 2, 2019

You can now use search expressions to define Amazon CloudWatch dashboards. This enables you to create dashboards that update automatically as new resources are created that match the search query, providing up-to-the-minute visibility with reduced operational overhead.

The search function is an enhancement of Amazon CloudWatch metric math and can be combined within math functions like SUM, AVG, MIN, and MAX. For example, you can combine SUM with SEARCH to track the count of failed health checks across all EC2 instances in an account.

It's easy to get started with search expressions through the Amazon CloudWatch console, or the GetMetricData API. From the metrics tab, just search for metrics then click the Graph Search button and a search expression will be automatically generated on your chart.

Search expressions are now available in all AWS public regions, including AWS GovCloud. Learn more about how to use search expressions in graphs