A quick way to generate helpful, pre-canned Datadog dashboards for Cloudwatch.

Setup

• Run npm install -g datadog_dashboards
• Edit dashboards.js with your dashboard changes. See this package's dashboards.example.js for a starter.

Uploading new dashboards

• Run datadog_dashboards
• Done

Alternatively, you can specify a dashboard file with the -d setting.

For example

$ datadog_dashboards -d <dashboard_file>

Configuration

By default, the Datadog dashboard creator will iterate through the dashboardsByEnvironment exposed in the dashboard.js file and run the generateEnvironmentDashboard function that has a set of default dashboards depending on the configurations in the dashboardsByEnvironment.

Your dashboards.js file should have at least the dashboardsByEnvironment object exported.

See the dashboards.examples.js as an example dashboard configuration.

Custom Widgets

Many canned sets of widgets for various core AWS resource types are provided out of the box, but you may wish to include your own completely custom widgets on your dashboards as well, or build dashboards with entirely custom widgets. This is done by configuring new widgets in custom key, using the JSON structure documented in Datadog here:

• https://docs.datadoghq.com/graphing/dashboards/widgets/

Since dashboards are built as Screenboards, you must still explicitly define the positioning and size of your widgets. Always assume all widgets defined within the custom config key are positioned relative to y = 0, for all custom widgets you add (as all of them will be positioned in the same area). For example, if you want widgets on a second row, you must specify that the y position for those widgets add in the height of the first row, plus a bit extra for spacing (usually 3 units). The script will automatically re-calculate the y position of all widgets before adding them to your dashboard to account for spacing before/after the custom graphs section. You must also define the total height you want to reserve for your custom widgets using the custom_height attribute. Any additional canned widgets will be positioned just beyond that height, so it's important to reserve this space, or canned widgets will be positioned directly on top of your custom widgets.

Environment variables

Datadog Dashboard Creator uses dotenv to allow for a .env file to have locally defined environment variables.

If you want to define these, they can bypass the prompts:

DATADOG_API_API_KEY=<datadog_api_key>
DATADOG_API_APP_KEY=<datadog_app_key>
DATADOG_DASHBOARD_JS=dashboards