# Connect your Amazon CloudWatch data to Geckoboard

Steps to connect directly to AWS CloudWatch to access your data.

June 17, 2022

## Estimated Billing Charges

To get started with our [Amazon (AWS) CloudWatch](/content/product/data-sources/amazon-cloudwatch/index.html) data source, you'll need to first create a connection and authenticate your Amazon (AWS) CloudWatch account.

1. After adding a new Amazon CloudWatch widget from your dashboard, give your connection a name to differentiate it from any accounts you add later on.

2. Next, enter your **AWS Key** and **Secret**. These are required by Geckoboard to access your **Amazon CloudWatch** account. We recommend using [Amazon's IAM facility](http://aws.amazon.com/iam) to create a separate access key and secret that has read-only permission on your AWS account.

To allow Geckoboard to send requests to the AWS API, please ensure that the IAM user that you have added to Geckoboard has `"Action":["cloudwatch:ListMetrics", "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics"]` in its policy.

3. Click on the Connect button to proceed to the widget configuration screen. For help with configuring your CloudWatch widgets, see [AWS' documentation on Dimensions and Metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-metrics-and-dimensions.html).

## Estimated Billing Charges

In order to use the Estimated Billing Charges widget in Geckoboard, you'll need to enable the **Receive Billing Alerts** option in your AWS console. Find out how to [enable the monitoring of your estimated charges](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html#turning_on_billing_metrics)