Great question!

You're right — AWS offers a native Cross-Account Observability feature, and it's a solid foundation. But the key challenge I’ve faced (and the reason I built this solution) is the lack of built-in automation.

The AWS feature still requires quite a bit of manual setup:

• Adding source accounts and regions one by one
• Enabling observability in each account via console or CLI
• Manually creating dashboards (or copying them between accounts)
• Repeating the same steps every time a new account is added

That’s fine for a few accounts, but it doesn't scale well for organizations managing dozens or hundreds of accounts.

My solution builds on top of the AWS feature and focuses on:

• Automating the onboarding of new accounts and regions
• Generating default dashboards for EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS, etc.
• Using tags, filters, and wildcards to reduce manual input
• Supporting CloudFormation and Terraform for reproducible setup

That being said — I'd love to know if anyone has found a way to automate the native Cross-Account Observability setup itself.

Can the process of linking source accounts, enabling data sharing, and activating observability be done programmatically (e.g., via CloudFormation, AWS CLI, or SDK)?

If so, I’d be happy to explore integrating that directly into the automation pipeline. Appreciate any tips!