Question

A CloudOps engineer manages a multi-account AWS Organization with separate accounts for production, staging, and development workloads. Leadership wants a single CloudWatch dashboard in a central monitoring account that displays EC2 and RDS metrics from all three workload accounts in one view. The solution must minimize ongoing operational overhead and avoid custom scripts that copy metric data between accounts. What should the engineer do?

Accepted Answer

Enable CloudWatch cross-account observability by linking the source accounts to the central monitoring account as the monitoring account, then build the dashboard referencing metrics from each linked source account.

Answer

Create a Lambda function in each workload account that uses GetMetricData and PutMetricData to periodically push metrics into the central monitoring account, then build the dashboard on the copied metrics.

Answer

Configure metric streams in each account to send metrics to a Kinesis Data Firehose that writes to a central S3 bucket, then build the dashboard from the S3 data.

Answer

Grant the central account IAM users cross-account roles and manually switch roles to view each account's separate dashboards side by side.