Question

A DevOps team manages 12 microservices, each deployed in its own AWS account under a single AWS Organization. The observability team needs a single CloudWatch dashboard in a central monitoring account that displays CPU and error-rate metrics from all 12 accounts, updated in near real time, without copying metric data or running custom scripts. What is the MOST operationally efficient way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Enable CloudWatch cross-account observability by configuring each service account as a source account and the monitoring account as a monitoring account, then build the dashboard referencing the shared source-account metrics.

Answer

Create a Lambda function in each account that calls GetMetricData on a schedule and uses PutMetricData to push the values into the monitoring account, then build the dashboard from the copied metrics.

Answer

Configure a metric stream in each account that delivers metrics to a Kinesis Data Firehose targeting an S3 bucket in the monitoring account, then query the data with Athena for the dashboard.

Answer

Use CloudWatch metric math with a cross-account IAM role assumed by the dashboard widget to read each account's metrics directly at render time.