Using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards - Amazon CloudWatch

Using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards

Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that are spread across different Regions. You can use CloudWatch dashboards to create customized views of the metrics and alarms for your AWS resources.

With dashboards, you can create the following:

  • A single view for selected metrics and alarms to help you assess the health of your resources and applications across one or more Regions. You can select the color used for each metric on each graph, so that you can easily track the same metric across multiple graphs.

    You can create dashboards that display graphs and other widgets from multiple AWS accounts and multiple Regions. For more information, see Cross-account cross-Region CloudWatch console.

  • An operational playbook that provides guidance for team members during operational events about how to respond to specific incidents.

  • A common view of critical resource and application measurements that can be shared by team members for faster communication flow during operational events.

You can create dashboards from the console or using the AWS CLI or PutDashboard API operation. You can add dashboards to a favorites list, where you can access not only your favorited dashboards, but also your recently visited dashboards. For more information, see Add a dashboard to your favorites list.

To access CloudWatch dashboards, you need one of the following:

  • The AdministratorAccess policy

  • The CloudWatchFullAccess policy

  • A custom policy that includes one or more of these specific permissions:

    • cloudwatch:GetDashboard and cloudwatch:ListDashboards to be able to view dashboards

    • cloudwatch:PutDashboard to be able to create or modify dashboards

    • cloudwatch:DeleteDashboards to be able to delete dashboards

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