Here are a few pointers to help you navigate and get the most out of Cloud Pegboard.
General guidance
To get the most out of Cloud Pegboard, it's worth spending a few moments to customize your profile settings. Part of the power of Cloud Pegboard is that you can control what information you receive and filter information that is not as important. In your profile you can choose to receive daily or weekly updates, and control what kinds of information are included in those updates. Importantly, you can also control which services are included in the updates.
CloudPegboard leverages lists of services that you create to optimize your ability to find information fast and to control what services are included in email updates. You can have as many lists as you need, often one per project or any other grouping of services that you find useful. See below for information on creating lists.
Bookmark the dashboard! Leave tab open.
The most import advice we have is to create a bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar and leave Cloud Pegboard open in a window/tab.
Creating lists of services
Lists of services let you focus on the information that is relevant to you at any given time. Since you likely work on multiple projects over time or larger projects that comprise multiple subsystems, you can create as many lists as you need to organize your work.
Lists are used to personalize your email updates by limiting updates to lists you've chosen to "watch." List are also used in the Datasheet dashboard view to create a launchpad to quickly find datasheets or jump to the console for each of the services in the list. The Services Table uses lists to filter the rows in the table to just those in the deleted list.
Lists are also used to create shortcuts in the AWS Console when you use our AWS Console Enhancer browser extension.
There are several ways to create lists.
- In the LIST ACTIONS menu, select "Create new list"
- Enter a name (may contain spaces)
- Check the "Watch" box if you want to include this list in your email updates. Note that you must also enable email updates in your profile.
- Click CREATE LIST
- Use the Search field to search for a service
- Click the Add icon to add the service showing in the current datasheet to the current list.
Other useful LIST ACTION menu options that will operate on the currently selected list (select via the list dropdown menu).
- Make default - Sets the currently selected list as the default list to appear when the datasheet dashboard page is loaded.
- Watch this list - Watch/unwatch the currently selected list in your daily or weekly email updates. Make sure to enable email updates in your profile.
- Delete this list - Deletes the currently selected list.
You can reorder items in a list by dragging an icon on top of another icon. The moved icon will be inserted just before the icon that you dropped it on. This order is used in the datasheet dashboard view and in the shortcuts bar in the AWS console if you use our AWS Console Enhancer browser extension. If you do not adjust the order manually, it will be sorted alphabetically.
To create a list on the Services Table page, select the desired rows in the table, then use the My Services menu to create a list. Details follow...
To select services
- Click on a row to select a service (avoid clicking on links when doing this)
- Shift-click to select a range of rows
- Control-click (PC) or Command-click (Mac) to select/deselect a single row to add/remove it from the current selections
- Use the search field to find services to select. Selections are maintained even if rows are filtered and not displayed.
- Clicking on a row will clear all selections and just select that row (take care not to do this when creating a list of selections using control/command-click)
To create list from selections
- Select a set of services as described above
- Select the My Services menu and enter a name for the list (may contain spaces and dashes)
- Optionally select Watch to enable email notifications for that list (you can enable/disable watches on lists via the profile menu or the LIST ACTIONS menu in the Datasheet view.
- Select Create to create the list
If you use the popular Cloudcraft diagramming tool, you can automatically create lists corresponding to your Cloudcraft blueprints (diagrams).
Details on integrating with Cloudcraft and creating lists from blueprints are on our Cloudcraft integration page.
We want to make it easy for your to create and keep your lists fresh. As an experimental alternative, we support importing lists from any document that contains lists of services. We have extractors for AWS bills, CSV files, infrastructure as code (CloudFormation, Terraform, CDK, CLI scripts, code using Boto3 or other SDKs, etc.), various diagram drawing tools, and more.
Until we determine which of these methods is most popular, we have not created UI forms for these. However, you can simply email your document(s) to us and we'll automatically create your lists for you.
Services Table tips
Searching (filtering rows)
- Search box searches across all attributes (even if they are not in view).
- Search is not case sensitive.
- A space between terms means AND.
- Some fields have special terms (instead of Yes/No) to help searching. For example, if Cloud Formation is supported, the field is populated with 'CFN' so that you can search using 'CFN'. Terraform is denoted with 'TFM', and each compliance type shows the full name as the field value. Therefore to search for 'PCI' or 'HIPAA' you can just enter those terms (case insensitive).
Filtering columns
Use the Perspectives menu choice to select the columns to display. Changing the perspective does not change what rows are displayed.
Using lists to filter rows
To filter the displayed rows using one of your lists
- Select My Services and select the desired list name
- Once a list filter is applied, searches will search within the filtered list
- To clear the filter, select Clear under the Filter heading
- To change your notification options (which lists cause notifications and at what frequency), click on your name in the menu bar and select Edit profile
re:Invent Sessions table
Our re:Invent sessions catalog changes during the year. After re:Invent, the catalog from the previous year contains links to YouTube videos, slides, and even downloadable audio files for all sessions when they publish these media. This information is available in the Sessions catalog or in the individual service datasheets.
When AWS releases the new sessions catalog (typically August), you can use the Cloud Pegboard Sessions catalog to make the most of our re:Invent session planning features. Please see our re:Invent Sessions Table tips page for using the re:Invent session table.
"AWS Console Enhancer" browser extension
A full description of the extension and usage information is on our AWS Console Enhancer browser extension help page.
Slack integration
Our Slack app lets you get a personalized cloud news feed, smart reading lists, and interactive commands for finding service info. For full details, please see this Slack help page.
Feedback please!
Please Contact us and let us know about anything that we can do better! We want you to have an awesome experience using Cloud Pegboard and need to hear from you so that we know where we can improve. Thanks!