The Serverless Framework has recently launched a new SaaS offering for monitoring, testing, and managing deployments for those who enjoy a browser-based UI experience. This means that the framework is no longer just a tool for development and deployment; now, you can extend it to gain insights into your entire development life cycle. The serverless dashboard is part of the serverless enterprise toolset and you need to sign up for an account before you can use it. This crosses over from the open source world into a more enterprise offering with support, so make sure you're aware of the fine print before globally adopting this.

The dashboard introduces a new top-level concept of an app. An app can be made up of multiple services and the app is a way to group those together.

The following is a screenshot of the dashboard showing an example of a serverless-hello-world app:

To get started using the dashboard, you need to add the following declarations to your existing serverless.yml file. The tenant is to match your deployment with your Serverless Enterprise username, while the app is the name of the app:

tenant: scottp    #your username in Serverless Enterprise
app: myapp        #the name of your app 

After saving the file, you need to log into Serverless via the CLI—this will open a browser to complete the signup and authorization process. You will also be able to create your app so that the entity exists when you connect your service up. Use the following command to kick off this process:

sls login

Finally, run another deploy command. In the output, you will be able to see some new log messages that show that the deployment is now running some standard checks and tests for security. These checks are configurable in the dashboard console. The following is the CLI output when you are deploying with Serverless Enterprise enabled. The output is slightly different here:

To get access to the dashboard, you can run the following CLI command, which will launch a new browser tab for the URL of your app:

sls dashboard

The dashboard follows the same free-tier numbers as lambda, in that you get all the features for up to 1,000,000 invocations per month. After that, you will need to contact the serverless team to explore subscription options. Currently, the dashboard only supports Node.js runtimes.

In the next section, we are going to introduce another way to develop serverless applications using the framework.