Creating CloudWatch Dashboards using CloudFormation

Keeping in line with creating infrastructure as code, I tend to create (most) CloudWatch Dashboards via CloudFormation. The reason I do this is not because it is cool (which it is), but because:

• It allows me to reuse the template across other stacks that are similar. I just need to pass in relevant parameters for the stack
• The Cloudwatch dashboard is automatically updated every time the Auto Scaling Group (and other related components) are updated. This is a huge win for me as I don’t need to manually update each and every widget of the cloudwatch dashboard every time the Auto Scaling Group is updated

The CloudWatch dashboard below is for an application stack which includes an Auto Scaling Group of web servers behind an ELB (Classic).

I’m interested in looking at only certain ASG and ELB (Classic) metrics that I believe are important for this application stack. A complete list of Auto Scaling Group Metrics and ELB Metrics (Classic) can be found on the Amazon Docs site here and here

My Cloudformation Template for creating the dashboard:

---
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "2010-09-09"
Description: Creates Cloudwatch Dashboard
Parameters:
  AutoScalingGroupName:
    Description: Enter the name of the Auto Scaling Group
    Type: String
  LoadBalancerName:
    Description: Enter the name of the Load Balancer
    Type: String
  DashboardName:
    Description: Enter the name of the CloudWatch Dashboard
    Type: String
Resources:
  BasicDashboard:
    Type: AWS::CloudWatch::Dashboard
    Properties:
      DashboardName: !Ref DashboardName
      DashboardBody:
        Fn::Sub: '{
              "widgets": [
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/EC2","CPUUtilization","AutoScalingGroupName","${AutoScalingGroupName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "AutoScalingGroup-CPU Utilization"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/AutoScaling","GroupTotalInstances","AutoScalingGroupName","${AutoScalingGroupName}"],
                             ["AWS/ELB","HealthyHostCount","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "AutoScalingGroup-Instances"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","Latency","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-Latency"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","RequestCount","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "stat": "Sum",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-RequestCount"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","HTTPCode_Backend_2XX","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"],
                             [".","HTTPCode_Backend_3XX",".","."],
                             [".","HTTPCode_Backend_4XX",".","."],
                             [".","HTTPCode_Backend_5XX",".","."]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "stat": "Sum",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-BackendResponses"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","HTTPCode_ELB_4XX","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"],
                             [".","HTTPCode_ELB_5XX",".","."]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "stat": "Sum",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-ErrorCodes"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","SpilloverCount","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "stat": "Sum",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-SpilloverCount"
                     }
                  },
                  {
                     "type": "metric",
                     "width": 12,
                     "height": 6,
                     "properties": {
                         "metrics": [
                             ["AWS/ELB","SurgeQueueLength","LoadBalancerName","${LoadBalancerName}"]
                         ],
                         "region": "${AWS::Region}",
                         "stat": "Maximum",
                         "period": 60,
                         "title": "LoadBalancer-SurgeQueueLength"
                     }
                  }
              ]
          }'

This template is part of a bigger (Ansible) playbook that is responsible for creating other components (Auto Scaling Group, Load Balancer, etc).

    - name: Create CloudWatch Dashboard
      cloudformation:
        stack_name: "{{ service_name }}-cloudwatch-dashboard
        state: present
        template: "./cloudformation/app-dashboard.yml"
        template_parameters:
          DashboardName: "{{ service_name }}"
          AutoScalingGroupName: "{{ auto_scaling_name }}"
          LoadBalancerName: "{{ load_balancer_name }}"