Using widgets on CloudWatch dashboards

Graph widget – You can add graphs that contain one or more metrics to your CloudWatch dashboard. The types of graphs that you can add to your dashboard include Line, Stacked area, Number, Gauge, Bar, and Pie. You can remove graphs from your dashboard when you don't need them anymore.

Manual metrics widget – If a metric hasn't published data in the past 14 days, you can't find it when searching for metrics to add to a graph on a CloudWatch dashboard. You can add any metric manually to an existing graph.

Metrics explorer widget – Metrics explorer widgets include graphs of multiple resources that have the same tag, or share the same resource property such as an instance type. These widgets stay up to date, as resources that match are created or deleted. Adding metrics explorer widgets to your dashboard helps you to troubleshoot your environment more efficiently.

For example, you can monitor your fleet of EC2 instances by assigning tags that represent their environments, such as production or test. You can then use these tags to filter and aggregate the operational metrics, such as CPUUtilization, to understand the health and performance of the EC2 instances that are associated with each tag.

Line widget – With the line widget, you can compare metrics over periods of time. You also can use the widget's mini-map zoom feature to inspect sections of line graphs without changing between zoomed-in and zoomed-out views. The procedures in this section describe how to add and remove a line widget on a CloudWatch dashboard. For information about using the widget's mini-map zoom feature with line graphs, see Zooming in on a line or stacked area graph.

Number widget – With the number widget, you can look at the latest metric values and trends as soon as they appear. Because the number widget includes the sparkline feature, you can visualize the top and bottom halves of metric trends in a single graph. The procedures in this section describe how to add and remove a number widget from a CloudWatch dashboard.

Gauge widget – With the gauge widget, you can visualize metric values that go between ranges. For example, you can use the gauge widget to graph percentages and CPU utilization, so that you can observe and diagnose any performance issues that occur. The procedures in this section describe how to add and remove a gauge widget from a CloudWatch dashboard.

Text widget – A text widget contains a block of text in Markdown format. You can add, edit, or remove text widgets from your CloudWatch dashboard.

Alarm widget – To add an alarm widget to a dashboard, choose one of the following options:

Table widget – With the data table widget, you can see the raw datapoints of your metric and a quick summary of that raw data. Because the data table widget is not a chart to abstract the actual data away from you, it is easier to understand the datapoints being presented. The procedures in this section describe how to add and remove a data table widget from a CloudWatch dashboard. The following image shows an example of a table widget with columns for the Minimum, Maximum, Sum, and Average statistics for a set of CloudWatch metrics.

Linked graphs – You can link the graphs on your dashboard together, so that when you zoom in or zoom out on one graph, the other graphs zoom in or zoom out at the same time. You can unlink graphs to limit zoom to one graph.