AWS
Connect AWS for EC2, RDS, and other CloudWatch-held metrics.
The AWS integration puts your AWS account's own monitoring data next to everything else you watch. CloudWatch metrics and logs arrive with dashboards for the services you are already paying for, so you can see how an account is behaving without building the views yourself or leaving to go and look.
Navigate to Integrations from the left-hand sidebar, then select AWS.
Permission tiers
Unlike most integrations, AWS needs credentials you supply - an IAM role or key with the right CloudWatch permissions.
| Tier | Requires |
|---|---|
| Read-only | The default. An AWS IAM role or key with CloudWatch:Get*, List*, and Describe* permissions |
| Read + Write | The Read permissions, plus CloudWatch:PutMetricAlarm and related write actions |
What it provisions
AWS declares four capabilities - Data Sources, Dashboards, Recording Rules, and Alerts. The dashboards, alert rules, and recording rules are provisioned as soon as the install succeeds.
The current version installs 16 dashboards, covering the services CloudWatch reports on.
Working across regions
The dashboards follow the region configured on the installation. If you connect several AWS regions, install the AWS integration once per region - each instance gets its own data source, its own dashboards, and its own folder.
Two dashboards are the exception, because AWS only reports their metrics to us-east-1. Both pin that region themselves, so they work whatever region an installation uses.
Two dashboards need extra setup
Two of the sixteen dashboards read metrics that AWS does not publish by default.
AWS Billing
The AWS Billing dashboard reads EstimatedCharges from the AWS/Billing namespace. AWS publishes that metric only if billing alerts are switched on, and only into us-east-1. The dashboard queries that region regardless of the region you configured, so no change to the installation is needed.
To switch it on, in the AWS console:
- Sign in to the management account of your organisation. The metric is published for the payer account, not for member accounts.
- Open Billing and Cost Management → Billing preferences.
- Enable Receive CloudWatch billing alerts, and save.
Note
The metric starts being published from that point on and is not backfilled. The dashboard stays empty for the first few hours, and shows no history from before you enabled it.
AWS CloudFront
CloudFront reports its metrics only to us-east-1 as well. The dashboard pins that region itself, so it works whatever region the installation uses - but the credentials you supplied must be allowed to read CloudWatch in us-east-1.
Warning
An IAM policy scoped to a single region will refuse this. If your CloudFront dashboard is empty, check that the credentials can read CloudWatch in us-east-1.
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