Hosting dashboards on Amazon EC2 offers several advantages that makes it a more powerful choice for organizations looking for control, reliability, and flexibility.

1. Customization

EC2 provides full control over your software environment, allowing you to install custom tools, libraries, and plugins. This flexibility means you can tailor dashboards exactly to your team’s needs. You can also integrate EC2-hosted dashboards with other services or APIs without restrictions. To take customization even one step further, companies often combine EC2 with AWS Data Analytics to extend insights across multiple data sources. Onedata software provides such customizations. Learn How

Example: Imagine your operations team needs to monitor thousands of IoT sensors across multiple factory floors. By installing a custom Grafana plugin on your EC2-hosted dashboard, you can stream live sensor readings, track anomalies in real time, and trigger alerts when values cross thresholds. All these in a single interface.

Similarly, if your analysts rely on a non-standard database that isn’t natively supported, you can connect Apache Superset on EC2 directly to that source. This unlocks advanced reporting, letting your team run custom SQL queries, build interactive charts, and merge insights with other business data—all without being limited by pre-packaged integrations.

2. Reliability

EC2 instances are highly reliable, capable of running continuously with minimal downtime. Features like Elastic IPs, automatic snapshots, and Amazon CloudWatch monitoring ensure that dashboards stay available and perform well, even during heavy usage.

Example: Consider a financial dashboard that tracks live trading metrics across global markets. By running on an EC2 instance, the dashboard can operate 24/7 without interruption, even during peak trading hours when data volumes surge. Executives and analysts can always access up-to-the-second stock prices, portfolio movements, and risk indicators, allowing them to react quickly to market shifts.

3. Security

With EC2, you have fine-grained access controls and complete control over network configurations. You can restrict access to specific IP addresses, enforce encryption in transit, and manage IAM roles to control who can view or modify dashboards.

Example: Imagine a company that manages both internal and external dashboards. The internal sales dashboard contains sensitive revenue data and customer details, so access is restricted to the analytics team’s office IP range, with additional IAM role-based permissions to control who can edit or only view reports. At the same time, a separate public-facing dashboard shares high-level performance metrics with partners and stakeholders. By using encryption in transit, even this external data is shared securely, ensuring compliance and peace of mind without compromising usability.

4. Cost Control

EC2 follows a pay-as-you-go model, so you only pay for the instances and resources you use. You can also scale resources up or down as needed, optimizing performance while keeping costs manageable.

Example: Consider a company that publishes quarterly performance dashboards to hundreds of employees. During normal operations, smaller EC2 instances handle daily usage efficiently, keeping costs low. However, when monthly or quarterly reports go live and user traffic spikes, the company can quickly scale up to larger instances or add additional instances to maintain fast, responsive dashboards. Once the peak period passes, they can scale back down or stop unused instances, paying only for the resources used. It maximizes both performance and cost efficiency.