The environment dashboard is your one-stop shop for managing and monitoring your newly deployed applications, as well as the inherited instances. In this section, we will quickly look at each of the sections present in the environment dashboard and how you can leverage them for your applications.

To start off with, the Dashboard view itself provides you with some high-level information and event logs depicting the current status of your environment. To learn more about the recent batch of events, you can opt to select the Show All option in the Recent Events section, or alternatively select the Events option from the navigation pane.

The Dashboard also allows you to upload a newer version of your application by selecting the Upload and Deploy option, as shown in following screenshot. Here, you can see a Running Version of your WordPress application as well. This is the same application that we just deployed using the EB CLI.

You can also control various aspects of your environment, such as Save Configuration, Clone Environment, and Terminate Environment, as well using the Actions tab provided in the right-hand corner of the environment dashboard:

Moving on from the Dashboard, the next tab in the navigation pane that is worth checking out is the Configuration section. Let's look at each of the configuration options in a bit more detail, starting off with the Scaling tile:

• Scaling: Here, you can opt to change your Environment Type from a Single instance deployment to a Load balancing, auto scaling enabled environment simply by selecting the correct option from the Environment Type drop-down list. You can even enable Time-based scaling for your instances by opting for the Add scheduled action option.
• Instances: In the next tile, you can configure your instance-specific details for your environment, such as the Instance type, the EC2 key pair to be used for enabling SSH to your instances, the Instance profile, and other options as well, such as the root volume type and its desired size.
• Notifications: Here, you can specify a particular Email address, using which, notifications pertaining to your environment—such as its events—are sent using the Amazon SNS.
• Software configuration: This section allows you to configure some key parameters for your application, such as the application's Document root, the Memory limit for running your PHP environment, and the logging options. But the thing that I really love about the software configuration is the Environment properties section. With this, you can pass secrets, endpoints, debug settings, and other information to your application without even having to SSH into your instances, which is simply amazing! We will be learning a bit about environment properties and how you can create simple environment variables and pass them to your WordPress application a bit later in this chapter.
• Health: One of the most important configuration items in your environment, the Health section allows you to configure the Health Check URL for your application, as well as to enable detailed health reporting for your environment using a special agent installed on your systems. This agent monitors the vitals of your EC2 instance, captures application-level health metrics, and sends them directly to Beanstalk for further analysis. This, in conjunction with the Application Logs, helps you to drill down into issues and mitigate them all using the Elastic Beanstalk Console itself.
• NOTE: You can find the agent's logs in your instance's /var/log/healthd/daemon.log file.

Apart from the Configuration tab, Elastic Beanstalk also provides you with a Logs option, where you can request either the complete set of logs or the last 100 lines. You can download each instance's log files using this particular section as well:

And last but not least, you can also leverage the Monitoring and Alarms sections to view the overall Environment Health, as well as other important metrics, such as CPU Utilization, Max Network In, and Max Network Out. To configure the alarms for individual graphs, all you need to do is select the alarm icon adjoining each of the graphs present in the Monitoring dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot:

A corresponding Add Alarm widget will pop up, using which you can configure the alarm's essentials, such as its Name, the Period, and Threshold settings, as well as the required Notification settings.

In this way, you can use the environment dashboard and the EB CLI together to perform daily application administration and monitoring tasks. In the next section, we will be leveraging this environment dashboard to clone and create a new production environment from the existing development environment.