Introducing CloudWatch alarms

CloudWatch alarms are a managed alert and notification service used to send notifications when an anomaly is detected in an infrastructure setup. Alarms are configured in relation to specific metrics. What an alarm does is it checks changes in the metric it is attached to based on specific conditions that have been given to it. When those conditions have been met, the alarm is triggered. An alarm can be configured to consistently check and ensure that the CPU usage of an EC2 instance does not exceed 80%. If it does for any reason, the alarm will be triggered and will push those state changes to Amazon SNS.

CloudWatch alarms in conjunction with Amazon SNS make alarms and notifications much easier to manage by reducing the operational expression of managing different alert and notification systems for your monitoring infrastructure, thereby aggregating metrics, alarms, and notifications as a complete set of solutions for alerting when the state of a...