Metrics Explorer

Metrics Explorer is a tag-based tool that enables you to filter, aggregate, and visualize your metrics by tags and resource properties to enhance observability for your services. Metrics Explorer visualizations are dynamic, so if a matching resource is created after you create a metrics explorer widget and add it to a CloudWatch dashboard, the new resource automatically appears in the explorer widget.

Read all about Metrics Explorer here.

  1. In the AWS Management Console on the Services menu, click CloudWatch.
  2. In the left navigation menu under Metrics, click Explorer.

Your screen should look similar to the screenshot shown below. (Empty Explorer) Metrics14

Metrics Explorer allows you to chose from Generic Templates (Lambda and EC2) or Service Based Templates, where you can chose which metric you want to add to a dashboard based on the service selected.

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  1. Click on the drop down that says Empty Explorer and select the lambda by runtime generic template.

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Metrics Explorer helps to bridge the gap between your resources and tags to enhance observability for your services. It provides quick and easy mechanism to filter, aggregate, and visualize your metrics by tags and resource properties. The visualizations you see here are dynamic, so if a matching resource is created after you create a metrics explorer widget and add it to a CloudWatch dashboard, the new resource automatically appears in the explorer widget.

  1. Click on the drop down again and select RDS.
  2. Select 1h in the top right.
  3. In the From search bar, select the aws:cloudformation:stack-name, then click Services.

This allows you to visualize all the metrics for all RDS DB instances that have a stack name = “Services” as their tag in the past hour.

Your screen should look similar to the screenshot below.

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  1. Click the Add to Dashboard button in the top right corner.
  2. Select Create new, then enter RDS-Services-Stack as the dashboard name. Click the small checkmark next to the textbox to save.
  3. Click Add to dashboard.

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  1. In the left navigation menu under Dashboards, click RDS-Service-Stack.

You should be able to see your newly created dashboard.

You can also create a new dashboard by completing the following steps:

  • In the left navigation menu, click Dashboards.
  • Click the Create dashboard button.
  • Name the dashboard Metrics-Explorer-Widget, then click create dashboard.`
  • Select the Explorer widget, then click create.

You can now add any resource and filter it by tag/resource property and directly save this dashboard.

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This concludes the Metrics module.