Monitor several AWS accounts with IAM roles (AssumeRole)

The legacy CloudWatch cross-account observability is no longer supported. If you previously monitored linked AWS accounts through a single primary account, those resources are no longer visible.

What changes after the upgrade to 2026.4

• The change affects these services: RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, Lambda, DynamoDB, EKS, Elastic Beanstalk, Direct Connect, and Transit Gateway.

• Resources discovered from other AWS accounts through CloudWatch cross-account observability are no longer polled.

• The SolarWinds Platform removes these resources automatically after the first successful poll of the primary account that reported them.

• Their historical metrics are removed with them and are not transferred to the resources discovered later from the linked account.

• Alerts, dashboards, reports, and groups that referenced these resources must be updated after you add the accounts again.

To continue monitoring these accounts, add each linked account individually using the IAM Role (AssumeRole) method.

Step 1: Prepare IAM roles in linked accounts

In each AWS account you want to monitor, create an IAM role with a trust policy that allows the primary monitoring account (or the EC2 instance running the poller) to assume the role. Make sure that the primary monitoring account has permission to call sts:AssumeRole.

Attach the permissions policy required for cloud monitoring. For details, see Establish AWS IAM permissions.

Step 2: Add linked accounts to the SolarWinds Platform

1. In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console, click Settings > Cloud Discovery.

2. Select Amazon AWS and then click Next.

3. Enter a Display Name for the cloud account.

4. If the SolarWinds Platform runs on an AWS EC2 instance with an instance role (IMDS), leave Access Key ID and Secret Access Key empty.

   Otherwise, provide the primary account credentials.

5. Optionally, provide one or more IAM Role ARNs the SolarWinds Platform should assume for this account.

   Supported Role ARN formats:

   • Format: arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT_ID:role/ROLE_NAME
   • External ID: arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT_ID:role/ROLE_NAME|EXTERNAL_ID
   • Role chain: ROLE_ARN_1;ROLE_ARN_2

6. Complete the wizard to select regions and services.

Add multiple accounts at once

To add many accounts at once, use the BulkAddAwsAccounts SWIS verb. You can add up to 100 accounts per call. For details, see BulkAddAwsAccounts Verb Documentation.