Amazon CloudWatch now supports dashboard variables

We are excited to announce Amazon CloudWatch dashboard variables, a new experience that makes it easier for you to quickly navigate between different operational views by using variables as navigation to view different data sets for the same resource.

With dashboard variables, you can create drill-down filters that enable you to build multiple views within a single dashboard. You can create a single dashboard with multiple custom variables, where you can switch between data sets, and more efficiently reuse and manage a more efficient fleet of dashboards.

Custom labels become navigation on your dashboard that can be used to toggle between data sets in the same view. You can now define set of labels such as 'application environment', 'region' or a 'customer id' and switch between those data sets based on the selection of label by using dropdown selectors, radio buttons or input boxes.

The new dashboard variable experience is now available in all AWS commercial regions at no additional cost and you can start using it immediately. You can use a step by step guide in the CloudWatch custom dashboard user interface to configure and manage your variables, or directly from a CloudWatch custom dashboard JSON, by adding an array of "variables" to the dashboard definition.

To learn more about creating dashboard variables, please refer to our documentation.