CloudWatch observability solutions

The dashboards for CloudWatch solutions use search-powered variables (dropdowns) that allow you to explore and visualize different aspects of your workloads dynamically.

By combining the flexibility of search-powered variables with the pre-configured metric widgets, the dashboard provides deep insights into your workloads, enabling proactive monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization. This dynamic approach ensures that you can quickly adapt the dashboard to your specific monitoring needs, without the need for extensive customization or configuration.

CloudWatch solution dashboards display metrics of the Region where the solution dashboard is created. However, the solution dashboard doesn’t display metrics across multiple Regions. If you have a use case to view data from multiple Regions in a single dashboard, you'll need to customize the dashboard JSON to add the Regions that you want to view. To do this, use the region attribute of the metric format to query the metrics from different Regions. For more information about modifying dashboard JSON, see Metric Widget: Format for Each Metric in the Array.

When using CloudWatch cross-account observability, solution dashboards in the central monitoring account display metrics from source accounts in the same Region. To differentiate metrics for similar workloads across accounts, provide unique grouping dimension values in agent configurations. For instance, assign distinct ClusterName values for Kafka brokers in different accounts for Kafka workload, enabling precise cluster selection and metric viewing in the dashboard.

If you have enabled cross-account using Cross-account cross-Region CloudWatch console, you won't be able to use the solution dashboard created in the monitoring account to view metrics from source accounts. Instead, you'll need to create dashboards in the respective source accounts. However, you can create the dashboard in the source account and view it from the monitoring account by switching the account ID setting in the console.

Solution dashboards leverage Search expressions to filter and analyze metrics for the workloads. This enables dynamic views based on dropdown option selections. These search expressions might return more than 500 time series, but each dashboard widget can't display more than 500 time series. If a metric search in the solution dashboard results in more than 500 time series across all Amazon EC2; instances, the graph displaying the top contributors might show inaccurate results. For more information about search expressions, see CloudWatch search expression syntax.

CloudWatch displays the metric information on the dashboards if you click the i icon on the dashboard widget. However, this currently doesn’t work for dashboard widgets that use search expressions. The solution dashboards use search expressions, so you won’t be able to see the metric description in the dashboard.

You can customize the agent configuration and the dashboard. Be aware that if you customize the agent configuration, you must update the dashboard accordingly or it will display empty metric widgets. Also be aware that if CloudWatch releases a new version of a solution, you might have to repeat your customizations if you apply the newer version of the solution.

Each solution provides the most up-to-date instructions and resources. We always recommend using the latest version available. While the solutions themselves are not versioned, the associated artifacts (such as AWS CloudFormation templates for dashboards and agent installations) are versioned.

You can identify the version of a previously deployed artifact by checking the AWS CloudFormation template's description field or the filename of the template you downloaded. To determine if you're using the latest version, compare your deployed version with the one currently referenced in the solution documentation.