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Introduction

CloudWatch is the monitoring service of AWS. It consists of several products including:

• Logs - All native AWS services log directly to CloudWatch

• Metrics - You get several system metrics in CloudWatch

• Dashboards - Dashboards can give you a quick overview of your application's health

• ... and many more!

CloudWatch can also notify you if your application is behaving differently than you expected. The goal for you as a developer or DevOps engineer should always be that you be notified about errors in your system before your customers experience them.

This is where CloudWatch Alarms can help you a lot!

CloudWatch Alarms

CloudWatch Alarms notify you once a system or service reaches a pre-defined threshold like errors or usage. CloudWatch Alarms act on top of CloudWatch metrics.

It is important to spend time defining your alarm thresholds. By having the correct ones you will know when something bad happens. Even before your customer knows. Some good example alarms are:

• Messages available in Dead Letter Queues

• Number of errors in Lambda functions

• Number of 500 errors in API Gateway

Alarm State

Alarms have two main states:

• IN_ALARM: The alarm is active -> You need to act

• OK: The alarm is not active -> All Good

• INSUFFICIENT_DATA: Not enough data is available

It is also possible that the alarm doesn’t have sufficient data. You can define if this will trigger the alarm or not. Normally it won’t trigger an alarm.

Alarms Are Dependent on Your Business Logic

Crafting alarms requires skill and depends heavily on your business logic. However, adhering to certain best practices is crucial. One vital aspect to consider is the limits of your AWS Account, which offers varying levels of services, including:

1. Service limits - Limits of your service, e.g. your Lambda function

2. Regional limits - Limits of your region, e.g. in eu-central-1

3. Account limits - Account-wide limits, e.g. the number of concurrent executions on your whole Account

For example, RDS can only have 40 instances per region. Lambda can only have 1,000 Lambdas running at the same time per region. To not run into any issues you need to keep this in mind when setting up your alarms.

Make sure to also create alarms around your given limits by AWS. If you should hit certain limits you will also experience downtime.

Metric Alarms vs. Composite Alarms

There are two different types of alarms:

CloudWatch Alarms and SNS

CloudWatch Alarms use the Simple Notification Service (SNS) under the hood. SNS is a notification service that can inform you in case of any errors.

It allows you to send personalized emails, SMS, or In-App Notifications in case of alarms. CloudWatch uses SNS to inform you of alarm changes. CloudWatch has really good integration with the E-Mail component of SNS. You can add your email address and get notified of alarms.

Since SNS is really flexible, you can also attach a Lambda function to the SNS topic. The Lambda function can do multiple things to alarm you. Some standard use cases are sending notifications via Slack, MS Teams, or Discord. You can also use PagerDuty to get informed about changes.

Now, let's see a CloudWatch Alert in action! 🚨

Setting Up CloudWatch Alarms

There are different ways for setting up Alarms. In this post, we will set up an alarm via the AWS Web Console.

Creating an alarm

Head over to CloudWatch -> Alarms -> All Alarms. Click on Create Alarm.

You now have to select a metric.

Defining alarm conditions

I chose the metric:

• Namespace - AWS/Lambda

• Metric name - Errors

• Dimension - Across all functions

This will give me all errors across all Lambda functions.

Now you need to define a Statistic function and a period. The statistic function defines how your metric points are calculated to reach an error. The period defines the period it uses to calculate this error.

For example, with Average and a period of 5 minutes, you define that if your Lambda functions have an average number of errors (we define the number in the next step) within 5 minutes the alarm will be triggered.

Other Statistic functions can be:

• Sum

• Minimum

• Maximum

• Percentiles

• Count

• ... and many more

Defining a Threshold

The next step is to establish a threshold for when your alarm should be activated.

Configuring Actions for Alarm Notifications

The next step is to define actions that should happen after an alarm changes it state.

First, you need to define the Alarm state trigger. This defines the state that triggers this alarm. You can choose from:

• IN_ALARM

• OK

• Insufficient data

Typically, you'll want to be notified once your alarm hits the status IN_ALARM.

As mentioned above, CloudWatch uses SNS under the hood for sending out notifications, typically emails. You can choose from the above to either use an existing SNS topic (in case you have one already), create a new topic, or even use directly an ARN to use a topic from another account.

For this example, we will create a new SNS topic and send an e-mail directly to our inbox.

There are some other options like Auto Scaling options (yes you can even auto-scale from CloudWatch Alerts) and EC2 actions but we will ignore them for this use-case.

Click on Next to give your alarm a name, click again on next and you will get an overview of your alarm.

Alarm Overview

Let's Test the Alarm

To be sure that our alarm actually works we can mock on alarm by using the AWS CLI. Use the following CLI prompt to put your alarm in alarm state:

aws cloudwatch set-alarm-state --alarm-name $ALARM_NAME --state-reason "Testing" --state-value ALARM

After executing it the alarm is in the state ALARM :

If you check your emails you should see an incoming email with a CloudWatch Alarm notification like that:

Execute the same bash command again just with the state OK to have the alarm in the correct state again.

aws cloudwatch set-alarm-state --alarm-name $ALARM_NAME --state-reason "Testing" --state-value OK

Your alarm works! 🎉

Conclusion

In conclusion, CloudWatch Alarms are an essential tool for monitoring your AWS resources and ensuring that you are notified of any issues before they impact your customers.

By setting up alarms based on your business logic and adhering to best practices such as keeping AWS service limits in mind, you can effectively monitor your system and take action when necessary.

With the help of SNS, CloudWatch Alarms can send personalized notifications to inform you of any changes in your system's state.

By following the steps outlined in this article, you can easily set up CloudWatch Alarms and test them to ensure that they are working as intended.