CloudWatch Dashboards and Container Insights
Build multi-service operational dashboards and enable Container Insights for ECS and EKS cluster-level performance metrics.
CloudWatch Dashboards Overview
CloudWatch Dashboards are customisable, multi-widget views of your AWS infrastructure that provide a unified operational picture. A dashboard can display metrics from multiple AWS services and accounts on a single screen using line graphs, number widgets, gauges, alarms, and log query results. Dashboards are global resources — one dashboard can show metrics from any Region. You can share dashboards publicly or restrict access through IAM policies.
Dashboard Widgets
CloudWatch dashboards support several widget types: Line and Stacked area graphs for time-series metrics, Number widgets for the latest metric value (great for KPIs), Bar charts for comparisons, Gauge for capacity indicators, Alarm status to show a summary of alarm states, Log table for Live Tail or Insights query results, and Text for labels and documentation. Combining widget types into one dashboard helps teams assess system health at a glance.
# Create a dashboard via CLI (body must be escaped JSON)
aws cloudwatch put-dashboard \
--dashboard-name ProductionOverview \
--dashboard-body '{
"widgets": [
{
"type": "metric",
"properties": {
"metrics": [["AWS/EC2","CPUUtilization","AutoScalingGroupName","my-asg"]],
"period": 60,
"stat": "Average",
"title": "ASG CPU Utilization"
}
}
]
}'All lessons in this course
- CloudWatch Metrics, Namespaces, and Dimensions
- CloudWatch Alarms and Composite Alarms
- CloudWatch Logs and Log Insights
- CloudWatch Dashboards and Container Insights