Console

Manage and monitor your apps with the SST Console.

The Console is a web based dashboard to manage your SST apps. With it you can invoke functions, debug issues, view logs, and manage all your apps, with your team — console.sst.dev

Get started

Start by creating an account and connecting your AWS account.

Create an account with your email

It’s better to use your work email so that you can invite your team to your workspace later — console.sst.dev
Create a workspace

You can add your apps and invite your team to a workspace. A workspace can be for a personal project or for your team at work. You can create as many workspaces as you want.

Create a workspace for your organization. You can use it to invite your team and connect all your AWS accounts.
Connect your AWS account

This will ask you to create a CloudFormation stack in your AWS account. Make sure that this stack is being added to us-east-1. Scroll down and click Create stack.

The CloudFormation stack needs to be created in us-east-1. If you create it in the wrong region by mistake, remove it and create it again.

This stack will scan all the regions in your account for SST apps and subscribe to them. Once created, you’ll see all your apps, stages, and the functions in the apps.
Invite your team

Use the email address of your teammates to invite them. They just need to login with the email you’ve used and they’ll be able to join your workspace.

Features

Here are a few of the things the Console does for you.

Logs

With the Console, you don’t need to go to CloudWatch to look at the logs for your functions. You can view:

Past logs
Live logs
Jump to a specific time

Issues

The Console will automatically show you any errors in your Lambda functions in real-time. And notify you through Slack or email.

With Issues, there is:

Nothing to setup, no code to instrument
Source maps are supported automatically
No impact on performance or cold starts, since the functions aren’t modified

Behind the scenes

Here’s how it works.

When an app is deployed or when an account is first synced, we add a log subscriber to your Lambda functions.
- There’s a maximum of 2 subscribers allowed. More on this below.
The subscriber filters for anything that looks like an error and processes those log lines.
It applies the source maps to the error stack trace.
Finally, it groups similar looking errors together.

Log subscriber

The process of adding a log subscriber to your Lambda functions might fail. This can happen if:

We don’t have enough permissions to add a subscriber. In this case, update the permissions that you’ve granted to the Console.
We’ve hit the limit for the number of subscribers. To fix this, you can remove one of the existing subscribers.

You can see these errors in the Issues tab. Once you’ve fixed these issues, you can hit Retry and it’ll try attaching the subscriber again.

Error detection

Issues reports Lambda function failures. In addition, for Node.js it reports errors that are logged using console.error(new Error("my-error")).

For the Console to automatically report your errors, you need to pass in an error object with the console.error call.

console.error(new Error("my-error"));

Limits

There’s a soft limit of 10K issues per hour per workspace. If your account goes over this limit, Issues will be temporarily paused. You can contact us if this happens.

Local logs

When the Console starts up, it checks if you are running sst dev locally. If so, then it’ll show you real-time logs from your local terminal. This works by connecting to a local server that’s run as a part of the SST CLI.

The local server only allows access from localhost and console.sst.dev.

The local logs works in all browsers and environments. But for certain browsers like Safari or Brave, and Gitpod, it needs some additional configuration.

Safari & Brave

Certain browsers like Safari and Brave require the local connection between the browser and the sst dev CLI to be running on HTTPS.

SST can integrate with mkcert to automatically generate a self-signed certificate. If you need support for this, feel free to open an issue on GitHub.

Gitpod

If you are using Gitpod, you can use the Gitpod Local Companion app to connect to the sst dev process running inside your Gitpod workspace.

To get started:

Install Gitpod Local Companion app
Run the Companion app
Navigate to Console in the browser

The companion app runs locally and creates a tunnelled connection to your Gitpod workspace.

How it works

At a high level, here’s how the Console works.

It’s hosted on our side

It stores some metadata about what resources you have deployed. We’ll have a version that can be self-hosted in the future.
You can view all your apps and stages

Once you’ve connected your AWS accounts, it’ll deploy a separate CloudFormation stack and connect to any SST apps in it. And all your apps and stages will show up automatically.
You can manage your apps

You can view all the functions in your app. You can view all the issues in your functions in real-time with the source maps automatically applied. You can view their logs, invoke them, or replay invocations. You can also save event payloads to your workspace.

For your functions running Live, the logs will be streamed in real-time from your local machine.
It’s open-source, built with SST, and deployed with Seed

The Console is a full-stack SST app. You can view the source on GitHub.

Security

The CloudFormation stack that the Console uses, creates an IAM Role in your account to manage your resources. If this is a concern for your production environments, we have a couple of options.

By default, this role is granted AdministratorAccess, but you can customize it to restrict access. We’ll look at this below. Additionally, if you’d like us to sign a BAA, feel free to contact us.

There maybe cases where you don’t want any data leaving your AWS account. For this, we’ll be supporting self-hosting the Console in the future.

IAM permissions

Permissions for the Console fall into two categories: read and write:

Read Permissions: The Console needs specific permissions to display information about resources within your SST apps.

Purpose	AWS IAM Action
Fetch stack outputs	`cloudformation:DescribeStacks`
Retrieve function runtime and size	`lambda:GetFunction`
Access stack metadata	`ec2:DescribeRegions` `s3:GetObject` `s3:ListBucket`
Display function logs	`logs:DescribeLogStreams` `logs:FilterLogEvents` `logs:GetLogEvents` `logs:StartQuery`
Monitor invocation usage	`cloudwatch:GetMetricData`

Attach the arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/ReadOnlyAccess AWS managed policy to the IAM Role for comprehensive read access.

Write Permissions: The Console requires the following write permissions.

Purpose	AWS IAM Action
Forward bootstrap bucket events to event bus	`s3:PutBucketNotification`
Send events to Console	`events:PutRule` `events:PutTargets`
Grant event bus access for Console	`iam:CreateRole` `iam:DeleteRole` `iam:DeleteRolePolicy` `iam:PassRole` `iam:PutRolePolicy`
Enable Issues to subscribe logs	`logs:CreateLogGroup` `logs:PutSubscriptionFilter`
Invoke Lambda functions and replay invocations	`lambda:InvokeFunction`

It’s good practice to periodically review and update these policies.

Customize policy

To customize IAM permissions for the CloudFormation stack:

On the CloudFormation create stack page, download the default template.json.

Edit the template file with necessary changes.

View the template changes

"SSTRole": {
  "Type": "AWS::IAM::Role",
  "Properties": {
    ...
    "ManagedPolicyArns": [
      "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess"
      "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/ReadOnlyAccess"
    ],
    "Policies": [
      {
        "PolicyName": "SSTPolicy",
        "PolicyDocument": {
          "Version": "2012-10-17",
          "Statement": [
            {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                "s3:PutBucketNotification"
              ],
              "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::sstbootstrap-*"
              ]
            },
            {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                "events:PutRule",
                "events:PutTargets"
              ],
              "Resource": {
                "Fn::Sub": "arn:aws:events:*:${AWS::AccountId}:rule/SSTConsole*"
              }
            },
            {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                "iam:CreateRole",
                "iam:DeleteRole",
                "iam:DeleteRolePolicy",
                "iam:PassRole",
                "iam:PutRolePolicy"
              ],
              "Resource": {
                "Fn::Sub": "arn:aws:iam::${AWS::AccountId}:role/SSTConsolePublisher*"
              }
            },
            {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:PutSubscriptionFilter"
              ],
              "Resource": {
                "Fn::Sub": "arn:aws:logs:*:${AWS::AccountId}:log-group:*"
              }
            },
            {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                "lambda:InvokeFunction"
              ],
              "Resource": {
                "Fn::Sub": "arn:aws:lambda:*:${AWS::AccountId}:function:*"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Upload your edited template.json file to an S3 bucket.
Return to the CloudFormation create stack page and replace the template URL in the page URL.

Pricing

The Console pricing is based on the number of times the Lambda functions in your SST apps are invoked per month and it uses the following tiers.

Invocations	Rate (per invocation)
First 1M	Free
1M - 10M	$0.00002
10M+	$0.000002

A couple of things to note.

These are calculated for a given workspace on a monthly basis.
This does not apply to personal stages, they’ll be free forever.
There’s also a soft limit for Issues on all accounts.
For volume pricing, feel free to contact us.

FAQ

Do I need to use the Console to use SST?

You don’t need the Console to use SST. It displays the local logs from your terminal in a UI that’s more convenient.
What if I don’t want to pay for the Console?

You can still invite your team and use it to view your local logs and stages.
Do I need a credit card to get started?

The Console is free to get started and doesn’t need a credit card.
Which Lambda functions are included in the number of invocations?

The number of invocations are only counted for the Lambda functions in your SST apps. Other Lambda functions in your AWS accounts are not included.
Do the functions in my personal stages count as a part of the invocations?

Lambda functions that are invoked locally are not included.
Can I access the personal stages if I’m above the free tier?

If you go above the free tier in your production stages, you can still access your personal stages. Just make sure you have sst dev running locally, otherwise the Console won’t be able to detect that it’s a personal stage.
My invocation volume is far higher than the listed tiers. Are there any other options?

Feel free to contact us and we can figure out a pricing plan that works for you.

If you have any further questions, feel free to send us an email.