Create dynamic cross account CloudWatch Dashboard

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your question. Keeping your Dashboard dynamically up to date is no easy job but with Metrics Explorer [1] and Search Expression [2] it can be tackled quite simply.

Metrics Explorer is a feature that allows you to dynamically populate metrics by the resource tags. For instance in your case, we can filter by the Instance Name tag or any other tag that you find common around the EC2 instances that you dynamically want to monitor on your Dashboard.

Once you create the graphs on your Explorer, you can add it as a Metrics Explorer widget to the Dashboard.

Alternatively, Search Expression can be also used here and it supports searching by the Namespace, Metric Name, Dimension Name and Dimension Values. For instance you can use below search expression to find all the CPUUtilization metrics from AWS/EC2 namespace with InstanceId schema(which is the dimension list for that metric).

SEARCH('{AWS/EC2,InstanceId} MetricName="CPUUtilization"', 'Average', 300)

Please check the related documents for detail information and including the limitations as well.

Hope this helps!

Thanks

Thank you for submitting your question, AWSJoe! We answered this on an episode of AWS re:Post Live. You can click this link and jump to 42:22 in the time code to listen to us discuss - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2204463289