Announcing Amazon CloudWatch cross account alarms

Amazon CloudWatch announces cross account alarms, a new feature that enables customers to set alerts and take actions based on changes to metrics in other AWS accounts. Cross account alarms provide alerting based on trends in metrics in different AWS accounts and can be used in combination with existing cross account dashboards to setup operational visibility in a centralized monitoring account. With cross account alarms, you can be alerted when a trending metric in a different AWS account indicates that further investigation is required before the trend starts to cause operational issues or impacts the end user experience.

For example, you dedicate an AWS account as a monitoring account that your team uses to monitor and troubleshoot a number of different AWS accounts that run your production application. Cross account alarms can be used to notify your team when average or max CPUUtilization across EC2 instances in all production accounts exceeds some acceptable threshold, like 80%. You can combine metrics from different accounts using Metric Math and organize cross account alarms into hierarchies using composite alarms in the monitoring account.

Cross account alarms are now available in all commercial AWS Regions, standard CloudWatch alarm pricing applies – see pricing page for details. To get started, first enable cross account permissions to give your monitoring account visibility on metrics in other AWS accounts. Then navigate to the CloudWatch alarms console and click Create Alarm. You will be able to search and select metrics from accounts you have granted permissions to view.

To get started with Cross Account Alarms please refer to our documentation.