Creating monitoring dashboards
The real value of collecting metrics is the ability to spot trends and relationships (often unknown or unexpected) between disparate systems. With this kind of visibility, you are able to identify and troubleshoot issues before they become an incident.
In addition to providing a way to aggregate and view metrics from your systems, the CloudWatch service also makes it easy to create monitoring dashboards so that you can quickly and clearly view the most important metrics.
This recipe uses the AWS console because you cannot create dashboards via CloudFormation or the AWS CLI tool yet.
Getting ready
You will need to have some metrics already present in CloudWatch in order to create a dashboard.
If you have been using AWS services (for example: EC2, RDS, DDB, and so on), then you should have plenty—almost all the AWS services populate metrics in CloudWatch by default.
How to do it...
- Navigate to the CloudWatch section of the AWS console:
- Go to the
Dashboardssection of...
