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Harinder Seera 🇭🇲 for AWS Community Builders

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AWS CloudWatch Dashboard Builder - Tool For SRE, Performance Engineers and DevOps

This is a three-part series. The first post gives background on why I developed the tool, and later posts explain how to use it.

For over five years, I have been using the AWS CloudWatch service for monitoring and troubleshooting application performance. Over that period, I have developed different Cloudwatch metric queries to help me quickly create CloudWatch dashboards or widgets for AWS services.

In the beginning, I used to write these queries in a notepad. From time to time, I would refer them to create a CloudWatch dashboard or widget if I needed them for a new project, client, or application. Also, occasionally, I lacked access to CloudWatch, so I had to ask a colleague to create a widget or dashboard. Before requesting them, I had to transform the query into JSON format. These reasons led me to create a tool for building CloudWatch dashboards.

The CloudWatch Dashboard Builder tool generates a JSON dashboard template with different metric queries. Queries can include SQL expressions as metrics. You can directly create the dashboard or copy the JSON and create it via the AWS Console/CLI.

The flexibility of this tool stems from the fact that it is powered by a namespace query template that you can change to meet your requirements. Next post in the series will explore Namespace template into more detail.

Here is a video showing how to use the tool to generate a dashboard or how to use the JSON to construct a dashboard using the CLI or AWS Console.

The benefits of this tool are:

  1. Capability to choose different metric templates for different AWS Namespaces or a custom Namespaces.

  2. Saves time in building the right CloudWatch dashboard for your needs.

  3. You can directly create the dashboard from the tool or generate the dashboard JSON.

  4. You can enhance the Namespace Query template by including your metric queries.

In next post we will explore namespace template. It will explain how to use it correctly with your own CloudWatch metric expressions.

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