The real value of collecting metrics is the ability to spot trends and relationships (often unknown or unexpected) between disparate systems. With this kind of visibility, you are able to identify and troubleshoot issues before they become an incident.

In addition to providing a way to aggregate and view metrics from your systems, the CloudWatch service also makes it easy to create monitoring dashboards so that you can quickly and clearly view the most important metrics.

This recipe uses the AWS console because you cannot create dashboards via CloudFormation or the AWS CLI tool yet.