Using CloudWatch metrics to create dashboards

Looking at individual metrics in CloudWatch can provide many insightful details. However, sometimes, it can be more useful to glance at a single pane of glass where the most relevant metrics are displayed all at once for a quick view. CloudWatch dashboards allow us to quickly and easily create these views – not only of the metrics created by the Amazon resources in our account but also custom metrics, along with text and hyperlinks to runbooks for documentation purposes in case of an emergency or other helpful documentation.

The CloudWatch service even comes with automatic dashboards for many of the most used AWS services, such as DynamoDB, EC2, Lambda, S3, EBS, and others. Each of these pre-configurated dashboards is interactive and can be viewed based on custom date ranges.

You can even share the dashboards that you create with people that don't have direct access to your AWS account. This can be done in a few ways...