The Secret Life of AWS: The Cockpit (Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards)
Stop switching tabs. How to build a "Single Pane of Glass" for your application.
Part 34 of The Secret Life of AWS
Timothy looked like he was playing the piano. His fingers were flying across Alt+Tab, switching between browser windows at a frantic pace.
"Lambda console... check," he mumbled. "No errors."
Click.
"DynamoDB console... check. Latency is good."
Click.
"API Gateway console... check. 500s are low."
Click.
"X-Ray console... check. Service map is green."
He sat back, exhausted. It was 9:15 AM, and he had already spent fifteen minutes just verifying that his system was alive.
Margaret watched him from the doorway, sipping her coffee.
"That is quite a morning workout, Timothy," she said.
"I have to check everything," Timothy explained, rubbing his eyes. "We have the Concurrency Limit (Part 30), the Trace Map (Part 32), and the Error Logs (Part 33). If I don't look at them, I feel like I'm flying blind."
"You are not flying blind," Margaret corrected gently. "But you are doing it the hard way."
"Imagine a pilot," she said. "Does the pilot run to the back of the plane to check the rudder? Then run to the wing to check the engines? Then run to the nose to check the radar?"
Timothy laughed. "No. That would be ridiculous. They sit in the cockpit."
"Exactly," Margaret said. "All the data comes to them. You need a Cockpit."
The Single Pane of Glass
Margaret navigated to CloudWatch in the AWS Console. She clicked on Dashboards and then Create dashboard.
She named it The-Assembly-Line-Monitor.
"A dashboard is a canvas," she explained. "We can paint it with any metric, any log query, and any alarm from your entire account."
Widget 1: The Engine Gauge (Concurrency)
"First, let's watch your capacity," Margaret said.
She selected the Lambda metric ConcurrentExecutions. She chose the Gauge visualization.
She set the max value to 1,000 (his Soft Quota from Part 30).
"Now," she said, "you can see instantly if the engine is overheating."
Widget 2: The Radar (Latency)
"Next, let's watch the speed," she said.
She added a Line Graph. She selected Duration for his CheckoutFunction and Latency for his OrdersTable.
She layered them on top of each other.
"If the lines go up together," she noted, "it's the database. If only the function goes up, it's your code."
Widget 3: The Black Box (Logs)
"Finally," she said, "let's add your Searchlight."
She selected Logs Table. She pasted the exact query Timothy wrote in Part 33:
fields @message | filter @message like /ERROR/ | sort @timestamp desc
"This will run automatically every time you load the page," she said. "You will see the latest errors without ever typing a query."
The Morning Coffee
Margaret hit Save.
Timothy looked at the screen. It was beautiful.
- Top Left: A gauge showing he was using 45% of his Lambda capacity.
- Top Right: A graph showing steady 200ms response times.
- Bottom: A list of the last 5 errors (mostly "User not found").
"It's... all there," Timothy whispered. "I don't have to click anything."
"This is called a Single Pane of Glass," Margaret said. "It gives you Situational Awareness. You don't have to hunt for problems. If a graph turns red, or a gauge hits the red zone, you know exactly where to look."
Timothy took a sip of his own coffee. For the first time in months, he didn't feel the urge to Alt+Tab. He just looked at his Cockpit, saw all green, and smiled.
"The plane is flying smoothly," Timothy said.
"Good," Margaret nodded. "Now you can actually spend your morning writing code."
Key Concepts
Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards: Customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that allow you to monitor your resources in a single view.
Widgets: The individual blocks on a dashboard. They can display:
- Line/Bar Charts: For trends over time (metrics).
- Gauges: For current capacity vs. limits.
- Query Results: Live tables from CloudWatch Logs Insights.
- Text: Markdown for notes or instructions.
Single Pane of Glass: A management philosophy of consolidating data from multiple sources into one unified display to improve "Situational Awareness."
Aaron Rose is a software engineer and technology writer at tech-reader.blog and the author of Think Like a Genius.
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