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