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Setup and administration

Learn about custom dashboards

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As a cloud and storage admin, custom dashboards give you a clear view of the systems and workloads you manage. They let you build and personalize views that match your work, priorities, and business goals, instead of being limited to preset layouts.

Custom dashboards use AI to create personalized views of your Workload Factory environment. You simply describe what you want to monitor in plain language, and the system automatically builds visual charts based on your needs.

Everyone in your Workload Factory account can view all custom dashboards. This shared setup helps teams collaborate and see the same operational information across your organization.

Why use custom dashboards

Workload Factory users manage many workloads, environments, and priorities, but standard dashboards only show preset views. Custom dashboards help solve several operational challenges:

  • Answer key questions quickly: Focus on the most important questions or gaps in your understanding instead of general system statistics.

  • Monitor what matters now: Track the metrics that match your current priorities, not a fixed set of health indicators.

  • Link technical data to business results: Show how system performance affects operations and business goals.

  • Avoid switching between tools: View all relevant information in one place—no need to switch between tools, pages, or exports.

What you can do with custom dashboards

During setup, the AI-guided dialog helps you define:

  • Workloads and resources to monitor

  • Key metrics that matter for your work

  • Time ranges and periods to compare

  • Views by region, workload, or other categories

  • Rules or requirements you need to track and show

Considerations and limitations

AWS credentials and permissions

To create or view custom dashboards, you need the correct AWS IAM permissions for the resources you want to monitor. Make sure the Workload Factory account has read access to the data sources used by the dashboards.

To build dashboards, Workload Factory uses read-only AWS credentials. These credentials allow only read actions, such as fsx:DescribeVolumes and fsx:DescribeFileSystems, for the following services: EC2, FSx, CloudWatch, Resource Groups Tagging API, Backup, CloudWatch Logs, KMS, and EFS.

Learn how to add AWS credentials and set up IAM permissions.

Workload Factory requires a link to connect to FSx for ONTAP file systems. A link creates a trust relationship and connectivity between Workload Factory and one or more FSx for ONTAP file systems. This enables you to monitor and manage certain file system features directly from the ONTAP REST API calls that are not available through the Amazon FSx for ONTAP API.

Learn how to create a link.

Read-only design

Custom dashboards are read-only. They cannot change your storage or workload settings. This lets you monitor your system without accidentally changing anything.

Limitations

The following limitations currently apply to custom dashboards:

  • You cannot share dashboards outside your Workload Factory account

Demo environment

If you're using a Workload Factory demo account, some prebuilt dashboards are available. They help you see what custom dashboards can do. Each dashboard shows a common monitoring need: disaster recovery status, capacity and costs across regions, and whether storage protection rules are being followed.

Sample prompts

The following examples show how to describe your monitoring needs in plain language:

  • Disaster recovery monitoring: "I am setting up a disaster recovery solution in AWS for my on-premises systems. I want to see a complete list of my on-prem resources and the status of each one at the disaster recovery site in the US East region, including whether it is configured, active, and healthy."

  • Multi-region capacity and cost: "I manage storage across several cloud regions and applications. I want clear visibility into how much storage I have allocated, how much is being used, and what it costs, with details for each region and each application."

  • Storage protection compliance: "I am setting up a new storage protection strategy based on my organization's standards. Show me all file systems and whether they meet these requirements:

    • Database workloads: 12 daily snapshots per volume and 2 tamper-proof snapshots per week.

    • NFS and SMB shares: 7 daily snapshots per volume and 1 tamper-proof snapshot per week.

    • ARP must be enabled on all volumes."

Next steps