# Getting started with CloudWatch automatic dashboards
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The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about every Amazon service you use. You can additionally create custom dashboards to display metrics about your custom applications, and display custom collections of metrics that you choose.

Open the CloudWatch console at [https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch/](https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch/).

The CloudWatch overview home page appears.

![\[An example of a CloudWatch overview home page, showing alarms and their current state, and examples of other metrics graph widgets that might appear on the overview home page.\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/images/images/Cloudwatch-default-dashboard-redacted.png)


The overview displays the following items, refreshed automatically.
+ **Alarms by Amazon service** displays a list of Amazon services you use in your account, along with the state of alarms in those services. Next to that, two or four alarms in your account are displayed. The number depends on how many Amazon services you use. The alarms shown are those in the ALARM state or those that most recently changed state.

  These upper areas help you quickly assess the health of your Amazon services, by seeing the alarm states in every service and the alarms that most recently changed state. This helps you monitor and quickly diagnose issues.
+ Below these areas is the *default dashboard*, if one exists. The default dashboard is a custom dashboard that you have created and named **CloudWatch-Default**. This is a convenient way for you to add metrics about your own custom services or applications to the overview page, or to bring forward additional key metrics from Amazon services that you most want to monitor.

**Note**  
The automatic dashboards on the CloudWatch home page display only information from the current account, even if the account is a monitoring account set up for CloudWatch cross-account observability. For information about creating custom cross-account dashboards, see [Creating a CloudWatch cross-account cross-Region dashboard with the Amazon Web Services Management Console](create_xaxr_dashboard.md).

From this overview, you can see a cross-service dashboard of metrics from multiple Amazon service, or focus your view to a specific resource group or a specific Amazon service. This enables you to narrow your view to a subset of resources in which you are interested. 

**Topics**
+ [Viewing the cross-service CloudWatch dashboard](CloudWatch_Automatic_Dashboards_Cross_Service.md)
+ [Removing a service from appearing in the CloudWatch cross-service dashboard](Remove_service_from_Cross_Service_Dashboard.md)
+ [Viewing a CloudWatch dashboard for a single Amazon service](CloudWatch_Automatic_Dashboards_Focus_Service.md)
+ [Viewing a CloudWatch dashboard for a resource group](CloudWatch_Automatic_Dashboards_Resource_Group.md)