Alarms
Alarms provide the ability to trigger actions when a metric crosses a specified threshold or enters an abnormal state. This helps to monitor and manage the health of your resources and prevent potential issues by alerting or triggering the necessary actions, such as stopping or scaling an instance. An alarm watches a single metric over a specified time period, performs one or more actions based on the specified metric, and sends notifications when its state changes. Common actions that alarms can perform include sending notifications through Amazon SNS, stopping or terminating EC2 instances, and scaling your Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing resources in response to changing resource demand.
Guide on AWS CloudWatch Alarms
AWS CloudWatch Alarms are an essential component of AWS cloud services. They monitor your applications, collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.
Importance: AWS CloudWatch Alarms are necessary for real-time monitoring of AWS resources and applications. They continually monitor your service metrics, check alarm thresholds, and send notifications or make automated actions when the threshold is breached. This helps in quick detection and rectification of issues, thus ensuring smooth and uninterrupted services.
Working: AWS CloudWatch Alarms work on metric data queries. When you create an alarm, you set a metric or expression along with a condition and threshold. The alarm will check this periodically and change its state if the conditions match the threshold. The state of the alarm changes among 'OK', 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA', and 'ALARM' depending on metric data.
Exam Tips: In the AWS Solution Architect exam, understanding AWS CloudWatch Alarms is crucial. Here are some tips:
- Understand the components of AWS CloudWatch Alarms including metric math expressions, anomaly detection, and threshold.
- Remember that you can set alarms for AWS resources metrics like CPU Utilization, Disk Read/Write, Network In/Out, etc.
- Know the difference between composite alarms and metric alarms.
- Understand the actions of an alarm, i.e., what happens when state changes ('OK', 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA', 'ALARM').
- Understand how billing alarms can be set to control the AWS cost.
- Exam questions may involve setting alarm thresholds and deciding on what action to take under alarm state.
- Questions on limits of alarms, i.e., how many actions per alarm, how many alarms per AWS account, etc. can be expected. Understand these well.
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