# Create alarms for metrics
<a name="receiving-notifications"></a>

In the CloudFront console, you can set alarms to notify you by Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) based on specific CloudFront metrics.

**To create alarms for metrics**

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the CloudFront console at [https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/v4/home](https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/v4/home).

1. In the navigation pane, choose **Alarms**.

1. Choose **Create alarm**.

1. For **Details**, specify the following: 

   1. **Alarm name** – A name for the alarm.

   1. **Distribution** – The CloudFront distribution that you're creating the alarm for.

1. For **Condition**, specify the following:

   1. **Metric** – The metric that you're creating the alarm for.

   1. **"IF" <condition>** – The threshold when CloudWatch should trigger an alarm and send a notification to the Amazon SNS topic. For example, to receive a notification when the `5xx` error rate exceeds 1%, specify the following:

      **5xx error rate** **> 1**

   1. **"FOR" consecutive periods** – The period of time that the condition must be met before triggering an alarm. When you choose a value, aim for an appropriate balance between a value that doesn't alarm for temporary problems, but will alarm for sustained or real problems.

   1. (Optional) **Notify** – The Amazon SNS topic to send notification to if this metric triggers an alarm.

1. Choose **Create alarm**.

**Notes**  
When you enter the values for the condition, use whole numbers without punctuation. For example, to specify one thousand, enter **1000**.
For `4xx`, `5xx`, and total error rates, the value that you specify is a percentage.
For requests, bytes downloaded, and bytes uploaded, the value that you specify is units. For example, 1073742000 bytes.

For more information about creating Amazon SNS topics, see [Creating an Amazon SNS topic](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-create-topic.html) in the *Amazon Simple Notification Service Developer Guide*.