A stock Lambda@Edge CloudWatch Dashboard that works

Why might I need this?

• You're using AWS Lambda@Edge.
• You've noticed that the stock "Monitoring" tab, that displays "CloudWatch metrics at a glance", is not working.
• You wish to have those graphs of "Invocations", "Duration", "Errors, Availability (%)", and "Throttles", for all AWS regions.

Then this might be the solution for you.

How to use

The file lambda-edge-dash.template.json contains the CloudFormation template. You can use the template via whatever approach to CloudFormation you are comfortable with. If you have less experience with CloudFormation perhaps this is a good starting point for how to use a CloudFormation template. For this template specifically, it's not creating any actual infrastructure so you probably won't need to worry about many of the CloudFormation options (eg. Rollback Triggers).

You will pass 3 parameters to the template to create a "Stack" consisting of one CloudWatch Dashboard.

• FunctionName - The name of the lambda function you wish to monitor eg. "testLambdaPlsIgnore",
• FunctionVersion - The version of the function you wish to monitor eg. "3"
• DashboardName - The name of the CloudWatch dashboard that will be created. It is recommended to incorporate the Lambda's name and version to avoid aliasing. eg. "testLambdaPlsIgnore-v3"

Iterating on the Dashboard

If the stock dashboard is not quite right for you, you may wish to iterate on it by cloning this repo. You will need Node.js to run make.js (I used Node.js v9.2.0 in case it matters). To rebuild lambda-edge-dash.template.json run node make.js. make.js uses any us-east-1 widgets in per-region-widgets.json to define the widgets that will show for all regions. per-region-widgets.json is in standard JSON format for a CloudWatch Dashboard, which means you can play around with the us-east-1 widgets in an existing CloudWatch Dashboard and then extract the full JSON source back to per-region-widgets.json.

Why?

When an AWS lambda is used at the edge, the stock "Monitoring" tab, that displays "CloudWatch metrics at a glance", does not work. This seems to be because AWS actually clones your Lambda function with a new FunctionName of us-east-1.<YOUR_FUNCTION_NAME> (this us-east-1. prefix seems independent of the region in which the lambda runs). Add to this the fact that the function will be able to run in a large number of AWS regions therefore you will likely need the same dashboard widgets repeated for every region. This project solves the function naming issue as well as sharing the definition of widgets for every AWS region.