Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of Amazon EKS Dashboard. This new centralised management interface provides unified visibility across Kubernetes clusters deployed in multiple AWS regions and accounts. The dashboard addresses operational challenges faced by organisations running distributed Kubernetes deployments in different AWS regions and accounts.
Writing on the AWS blog, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter writes about the motivation for creating the EKS dashboard:
Many customers resort to third-party tools for centralized cluster visibility, which adds complexity through identity and access setup, licensing costs, and maintenance overhead.
– Micah Walter
The dashboard offers insights into three primary resource types: clusters, managed node groups, and EKS add-ons. Organisations can view aggregated data showing cluster distribution by region and account, version information, support status, and forecasted extended support costs for EKS control planes. The interface also displays cluster health metrics and allows users to drill down into specific data with automatic filtering capabilities.
The dashboard has multiple visualisation formats, including graphical, tabular, and map views of Kubernetes clusters. Advanced filtering and search functionality allow administrators to identify clusters that need attention, and an export function lets users extract data for external analysis or custom reporting.
Setting up the dashboard needs access through AWS Organisations’ management or a delegated administrator account. The configuration process involves enabling trusted access as a one-time setup through the Amazon EKS console’s organisations settings page.
While primarily designed for Amazon EKS clusters, the dashboard can also provide visibility into connected Kubernetes clusters running on-premises or on other cloud providers. Connected clusters may have limited data granularity compared to native EKS clusters, which is helpful for organisations running hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
AWS’s announcement follows Google Cloud’s recent release of Kubernetes History Inspector (KHI), an open-source tool focused on visualising cluster logs chronologically for troubleshooting purposes. While both tools address Kubernetes management challenges, they take different approaches to the problem.
The EKS Dashboard emphasises centralised inventory management and operational oversight across multiple clusters and accounts. It provides high-level organisational visibility with features like cost forecasting and compliance assessment. In contrast, Google’s KHI focuses on troubleshooting and debugging individual cluster issues through detailed log analysis and timeline visualisation. KHI offers microscopic views of component states and their relationships over time, with both macroscopic cluster history and detailed component-level analysis, making it particularly valuable for incident response and root cause analysis.
A key architectural difference lies in scope and integration. The EKS Dashboard operates as a native AWS Console feature designed for broad organisational visibility, whilst KHI functions as a specialised open-source tool requiring separate deployment. KHI currently works exclusively with Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Logging, though plans exist to extend support to vanilla Kubernetes deployments.
Microsoft’s Azure Stack Hub offers a more traditional approach with its Kubernetes Dashboard implementation, which provides basic management operations through the standard Kubernetes web interface. Unlike AWS’s centralised organisational view or Google’s specialised troubleshooting view, Azure Stack Hub’s solution requires manual certificate management and has a more complex SSH-based setup. The Azure solution primarily serves single-cluster management scenarios and requires significantly more technical expertise to configure and maintain.
Writing on LinkedIn, Senior DevOps Engineer Akhilesh Mishra says:
People have been asking for it for a long time, and finally AWS launched it: better late than never. AWS is trying to catch up with so many tiny, essential features they missed while building services for everything.
As explained in a video on the “Containers from the Couch” YouTube channel, the dashboard serves cloud architects who “very quickly want to see the lay of the land” with immediate cluster overview information. For platform administrators, the tool enables “quick zero friction compliance checks” to identify clusters running older Kubernetes versions or those requiring extended support. The dashboard also addresses financial planning needs, with the demonstration noting that FinOps engineers can “project out how much extended support will cost” over specified timeframes. This cost forecasting capability, combined with detailed upgrade insights showing “issues that would prevent the upgrade from going through like deprecated API usage,” positions the dashboard as both an operational and strategic planning tool.
Amazon EKS Dashboard is available immediately in the us-east-1 (North Virginia) region and can aggregate data from all commercial AWS regions. AWS provides the dashboard at no additional charge to EKS customers.
