Dashboards

5 minutes 5 Questions

Dashboards are the customizable home pages within Amazon CloudWatch that allow you to create visualizations and monitoring views for your AWS resources. They provide a single pane of glass to monitor the performance and health of your applications and infrastructure across different AWS services. Dashboards support widgets, which are tools for displaying metrics, logs, alarms, and other operational data. You can create widgets for individual metrics or aggregate different metrics to create a holistic view of your entire environment. Dashboards also support sharing, enabling you to provide read-only access to teammates or stakeholders who may need to monitor the system.

A Comprehensive Guide to AWS CloudWatch Dashboards

AWS CloudWatch Dashboards is a critical topic often covered in the 'AWS Solution Architect' exams.

What is AWS CloudWatch Dashboards?
AWS CloudWatch Dashboard is a customizable home page in the AWS Management Console. It helps you monitor your resources in a single view. It includes various widgets to represent various types of information, which could be crucial in your resource management and decision-making processes.

Why is it important?
Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards are important because it helps users monitor their AWS resources and applications in a unified view. This means you can see key data and alarms with custom layouts and those widgets you set.

How does it work?
You start by selecting your metrics from various AWS resources, then you create custom dashboards to display those metrics. You have different widget types to choose from: graphs, numbers, text or even other dashboards. This allows you to create a comprehensive view of your cloud environment.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Dashboards
1. Understand the value that customizable dashboards bring and why we use them2. Know what kind of widgets are available and what kind of insights they provide3. Review CloudWatch pricing model. The number of CloudWatch dashboards and widgets can impact costs4. Be aware of the limitations, e.g., maximum of 5000 metrics per dashboard, etc5. Remember this is a tool to help you visualize and manage your AWS environment, not a security or governance tool

Best of luck with your exams and understanding Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards!

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Question 1

You have set up a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor various AWS resources for Application A. Recently, you have received alerts due to a sudden traffic spike. How can you implement a solution to quickly update the entire dashboard to account for the increased traffic?

Manually modify each metric individually by editing the widget settings. Use CloudWatch Metrics Math to apply a constant factor to all metrics displayed on the dashboard. Transfer the current dashboard data to another dashboard. Create a new dashboard specifically for high traffic instances.

Correct Answer: Use CloudWatch Metrics Math to apply a constant factor to all metrics displayed on the dashboard.

Using CloudWatch Metrics Math, you can perform arithmetic operations on multiple metrics as well as apply a constant factor to all the metrics displayed. This allows you to quickly and efficiently account for spikes in traffic without making manual changes.

Question 2

You have been monitoring your company's website performance using a CloudWatch dashboard. After a recent software update, the website suffers from increased latency. Which of the following solutions would best display the latency patterns over the past 24 hours?

Update the dashboard widget to display the Sample Count latency. Display the Maximum latency metric to identify the single highest latency occurrence. Update the dashboard widget to display the Average latency to show trends and variations. Display the Minimum latency metric to identify the single lowest latency occurrence.

Correct Answer: Update the dashboard widget to display the Average latency to show trends and variations.

To properly analyze latency patterns after the software update, you should consider the average latency in your CloudWatch dashboard. This displays a comprehensive view of the trends and variations in latency over a desired time period, such as the past 24 hours.

Question 3

Your application server team frequently asks for the metrics displayed on your CloudWatch dashboard in order to assist in capacity planning. What can you do to automatically provide them with these metrics, ensuring that the data is up-to-date?

Manually email the dashboard as a pdf to the team every day. Set up a scheduled Lambda function to export the dashboard as a pdf and email it to the team. Grant them read access to the database storing the metrics data. Use CloudWatch Alarms to send notifications when metrics exceed a certain threshold.

Correct Answer: Set up a scheduled Lambda function to export the dashboard as a pdf and email it to the team.

Setting up a scheduled Lambda function that exports the CloudWatch dashboard as a pdf and emails it to the application team is the most efficient way to keep them informed. This ensures that they always have access to up-to-date metrics without needing to request it frequently.

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