  It is now well understood that the coefficient of shear viscosity of boundary
fluid can be obtained from the horizon values of the effective coupling of
transverse graviton in bulk spacetime. In this paper we observe that to find
the shear viscosity coefficient it is sufficient to know only the near horizon
geometry of the black hole spacetime. One does not need to know the full
analytic solution. We consider several examples including non-trivial matter
(dilaton, gauge fields) coupled to gravity in presence of higher derivative
terms and calculate shear viscosity for both extremal and non-extremal black
holes only studying the near horizon geometry. In particular, we consider
higher derivative corrections to extremal R-charged black holes and compute
$\eta/s$ in presence of three independent charges. We also consider
asymptotically Lifshitz spacetime whose dual black hole geometry can not be
found analytically. We study the near horizon behaviour of these black holes
and find $\eta/s$ for its dual plasma at Lifshitz fixed point.
