Monitor usage of Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for cost optimization

Question

I have several hundred Amazon CloudWatch dashboards and they cost a significant amount of money at $3 USD a pop. I'm sure out of all these dashboards, at least some of them are not actively being utilized.

What is the best way to identify which CloudWatch dashboards are actively being used by team members, and which ones are not? The dashboards that aren't actively being used can probably be backed up / exported and then deleted from our AWS account structure.

I'm assuming that the best way to accomplish this would be to monitor CloudTrail logs. Is there some other mechanism I should be looking at for this purpose?

Answer

To best of my knowledge, easiest way would be querying cloudtrail on the basis of eventName **GetDashboard**. CLI command would look like something as below:

aws cloudtrail lookup-events --lookup-attributes AttributeKey=EventName,AttributeValue=GetDashboard --profile  --query 'Events[].{username:Username,eventDetail:CloudTrailEvent}'

Assumption here is, getting the data from last 90 days would be enough for you to decide, which dashboards are being accessed and then filter from all the available dashboards and decide which are not being accessed at all and can be decommissioned.

If you have cloudtrail logs exported to s3, then certainly you can look beyond 90 days by querying the same data for eventName=GetDashboard filter.

Hope it helps, comment here if you have additional questions, happy to help.

Abhishek

Monitor usage of Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for cost optimization

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