Building CloudWatch dashboards

Monitoring and troubleshooting AWS

John Q. Martin

Principal Consultant

Automatic dashboards

Example of a pre-built CloudWatch automatic dashboard for an AWS service

Pre-built, service-specific, zero configuration
Generated automatically for AWS services you use
Updates in real-time as resources change
Free to use
Available types: cross-service overview, per-service, per-resource

Custom dashboards

Collection of widgets displaying metrics and alarms
Grid: 24 columns wide, up to 1000 rows
Limits: 500 metrics, 500 widgets per dashboard
CLI, Console, or IaC

Example of a CloudWatch custom dashboard with multiple metric widgets on a grid

When to use automatic vs. custom

Decision guide comparing when to use automatic versus custom CloudWatch dashboards

Custom dashboard widgets

CloudWatch graph widget types including stacked area, bar, line, and pie charts

Custom dashboard widgets

CloudWatch number and gauge widgets for displaying KPIs and point in time values

Custom dashboard widgets

Full set of CloudWatch widget types including text and log widgets for added context

Dashboard design principles

Five dashboard design best practices for organizing and prioritizing metrics

You can find more detail about effective dashboard design principles, best practices along with examples in our DataCamp tutorial "Effective Dashboard Design: Principles, Best Practices, and Examples"

Detecting performance issues

Dashboard graph showing CPU contention dragging down response times despite normal traffic

Dashboard graph highlighting external call latency from slow downstream dependencies

Dashboard graph tracking intermittent error spikes over time to spot correlations

Dashboard graph showing a memory leak with gradually creeping resource consumption

Create a custom dashboard

Iterative workflow for creating a custom dashboard from widgets to sharing

Sharing dashboards with others

Three methods for sharing a CloudWatch dashboard with others

CloudWatch console showing the dashboard sharing configuration options

Let's practice!

Monitoring and troubleshooting AWS