One of the aims of the CMS design is to construct and operate a very high quality electromagnetic calorimeter. The detector performance will be monitored using applications based on the CMS Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) framework and running on the High-Level Trigger Farm as well as on local DAQ systems. The monitorable quantities are organized into hierarchical structures based on the physics content. The information produced is delivered to client applications according to their subscription requests. The client applications process the received quantities, according to pre-defined analyses, making the results immediately available, and store the results in a database, and in the form of static web pages, for subsequent studies. We describe here the functionalities of the CMS ECAL DQM applications and report about their use in a real environment.