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Overview

This solution demonstrates how to deploy Cloud Intelligence Dashboards in your AWS environment using AWS CloudFormation templates or command line tools. These pre-built dashboards enable you to drive financial accountability, optimize costs, and track usage goals across their AWS infrastructure. The solution also implements governance best practices and supports operational excellence through automated deployment, secure data handling, and efficient serverless architecture. By providing comprehensive visibility into cost and usage patterns, these dashboards can help you make informed decisions about your AWS resources while maintaining security and performance standards. These pre-built dashboards help customers drive financial accountability, optimize cost, track usage goals, implement best-practices for governance, and achieve operational excellence across all Well Architected pillars.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Foundational dashboards: deployment

This architecture diagram shows how to set up the foundation for cloud observability with Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

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Diagram illustrating an AWS cloud architecture for data export, collection, and dashboard visualization using S3 buckets, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight.

Foundational dashboards: architecture

This architecture diagram shows the connection flow for foundational Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

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Advanced dashboards: deployment

This architecture diagram shows the setup for the foundational and advanced Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

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Advanced dashboards: architecture

This architecture diagram shows the connection flow for the foundational and advanced Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

Download the architecture diagram
Diagram of an AWS cloud architecture for data collection and visualization, showing components like S3 buckets, AWS Glue, Lambda, Amazon Athena, and QuickSight, with data flow between management, linked accounts, and user dashboards.

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Dive deep into the implementation guide for additional customization options and service configurations to tailor to your specific needs.

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Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs.

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Go to sample code: data collection

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

CloudFormation automates the deployment process in a dedicated account, adhering to best practices. This solution processes data from AWS CUR, and Trusted Advisor, storing it in Amazon S3. AWS Glue processes this information, which Athena then queries to update QuickSight visualizations. This streamlined workflow helps ensure you always have access to up-to-date cost insights through your dashboards.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

This solution employs role-based access controls and follows the principle of least privilege. Administrators can manage different user personas through a QuickSight and IAM integration or IAM Identity Center, while CloudFormation templates help ensure deployment with minimal required permissions. You can maintain data sovereignty by keeping all cost and usage information within your own S3 buckets, eliminating the need for third-party tools. Even if your organization has multiple Management Accounts, you can enhance security through row-level security, restricting access to only your owned linked accounts' data. Additionally, AWS CUR stored in Amazon S3 can be encrypted at rest for enhanced data protection.

Read the Security whitepaper

Amazon S3 is a durable storage service for cost and usage data, which AWS Glue and Lambda process before visualization through Athena and QuickSight. This serverless approach provides resilient data processing with automatic retries and failover capabilities. This solution also offers reliability insights, including information on single-Availability Zone virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoints and Trusted Advisor recommendations across the organization. By using a highly available and durable serverless architecture, this solution offers reliable visualization of service usage and billing information, minimizing the risk of downtime or data loss.

Read the Reliability whitepaper

This solution combines Athena views and QuickSight datasets to efficiently process and visualize large-scale data. This approach offers automatic scaling without compromising performance, adapting seamlessly to changing workload demands. By leveraging services like Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Athena, QuickSight, and Lambda, you can maintain high performance efficiency while scaling up or down as needed. This helps you to access and analyze your cost and usage data quickly and efficiently, regardless of the volume of information being processed.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

QuickSight offers cost-effective visualization of AWS usage data. You can customize dashboards without incurring additional fees to maximize value. By primarily using serverless services like Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Athena, and Lambda, you pay only for the resources you use, aligning costs directly with actual usage and demand.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

Built on serverless services, including Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Athena, QuickSight, and Lambda, this solution enables organizations to improve financial accountability, cost optimization, and sustainability initiatives. The serverless architecture consumes resources only as needed, supporting a sustainable approach, potentially reducing overall energy consumption and environmental impact.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

References to third-party services or organizations in this Guidance do not imply an endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between Amazon or AWS and the third party. Guidance from AWS is a technical starting point, and you can customize your integration with third-party services when you deploy the architecture.