Creating a CloudWatch dashboard

To get started, create a CloudWatch dashboard. You can create multiple dashboards, and you can add dashboards to a favorites list. You aren't limited to the number of dashboards that you can have in your AWS account. All dashboards are global. They are not Region-specific.

The following procedure shows you how to create a dashboard from the CloudWatch console. You can use the PutDashboard API operation to create a dashboard from the command line interface. The API operation contains a JSON string that defines your dashboard content. For more information about creating a dashboard with the PutDashboard API operation, see PutDashboard in the Amazon CloudWatch API Reference.

Tip

If you're creating a new dashboard with the PutDashboard API operation, you can use the JSON string from a dashboard that already exists.

To create a dashboard from the console

1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Dashboards, and then choose Create dashboard.

3. In the Create new dashboard dialog box, enter a name for the dashboard, and then choose Create dashboard.

   If you use the name CloudWatch-Default or CloudWatch-Default-ResourceGroupName, the dashboard appears in the overview of the CloudWatch home page under Default Dashboard. For more information, see Getting started with Amazon CloudWatch.

4. In the Add to this dashboard dialog box, do one of the following:

   • To add a graph to the dashboard, choose Line or Stacked area, and then choose Configure. In the Add metric graph dialog box, select the metric(s) to graph, and then choose Create widget. If a metric doesn't appear in the dialog box because it hasn't published data in more than 14 days, you can add it manually. For more information, see Graph metrics manually on a CloudWatch dashboard.

   • To add a number displaying a metric to the dashboard, choose Number, and then choose Configure. In the Add metric graph dialog box, select the metric(s) to graph, and then choose Create widget.

   • To add a text block to the dashboard, choose Text, and then choose Configure. In the New text widget dialog box, for Markdown, format your text using Markdown, and then choose Create widget.

5. (Optional) Choose Add widget, and then repeat step 4 to add another widget to the dashboard. You can repeat this step multiple times.

   For each graph on the dashboard, there is an information icon at the upper right. Choose this icon to see the descriptions of the metrics in the graph.

6. Choose Save dashboard.