Get your alarms right
Coverage, dead alarms and noise: make CloudWatch alarms something you can actually trust.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Monitoring AWS
Add CloudWatch alarms to EC2 instances
An instance with no alarms tells you nothing when it breaks — wire the baseline four metrics and tag-driven automation.
13 min - 2 Monitoring AWS
Add CloudWatch alarms to RDS instances
RDS without alarms only tells you it failed by the application timing out — wire the standard set so the database tells on itself first.
13 min - 3 Monitoring AWS
Add CloudWatch alarms to load balancers
Load balancers see every request - alarms on 5xx rates and unhealthy host count catch outages before customers do.
13 min - 4 Monitoring AWS
Add error alarms to Lambda functions
A Lambda that throws errors silently is the most expensive failure mode in serverless — every retry costs money and the user never sees it.
12 min - 5 Monitoring AWS
Fix CloudWatch alarms with no actions
An alarm that fires but notifies nobody is a logged silence. Wire actions to every alarm before something burns quietly.
12 min - 6 Monitoring AWS
Wire OK actions on CloudWatch alarms
If you page on alarm, page on recovery too — otherwise on-call wonders whether it's still broken.
11 min - 7 Monitoring AWS
Fix INSUFFICIENT_DATA alarms
An alarm in INSUFFICIENT_DATA isn't quiet — it's blind. The metric stopped reporting, often because the resource is gone or the dimensions are wrong.
12 min - 8 Monitoring AWS
Tame flapping CloudWatch alarms
10 state transitions in 24 hours isn't a fire — it's a misconfigured threshold. Tune the eval window or use anomaly detection.
12 min - 9 Monitoring AWS
Address frequently firing alarms
An alarm that fires 158 times in 30 days isn't catching incidents — it's generating noise. Tune, suppress, or fix the underlying problem.
13 min - 10 Monitoring AWS
Audit alarms that never trigger
An alarm that's been OK for 12 months is either fine or unverified — review periodically before you trust it for the next incident.
11 min - 11 Monitoring AWS
Resolve alarms stuck in ALARM state
An alarm in ALARM is either a real fire or a stale signal. Triage, fix the underlying condition, or fix the alarm.
14 min