Best practice alarm recommendations for AWS services - Amazon CloudWatch
Find and create recommended alarms

Best practice alarm recommendations for AWS services

CloudWatch provides out-of-the box alarm recommendations. These are CloudWatch alarms that we recommend that you create for metrics that are published by other AWS services. These recommendations can help you identify the metrics that you should set alarms for to follow best practices for monitoring. The recommendations also suggest the alarm thresholds to set. Following these recommendations can help you not miss important monitoring of your AWS infrastructure.

To find the alarm recommendations, you use the metrics section of the CloudWatch console, and select the alarm recommendations filter toggle. If you navigate to the recommended alarms in the console and then create a recommended alarm, CloudWatch can pre-fill some of the alarm settings. For some recommended alarms, the alarm threshold value is also pre-filled. You can also use the console to download infrastructure-as-code alarm definitions for recommended alarms, and then use this code to create the alarm in AWS CloudFormation, the AWS CLI, or Terraform.

You can also see the list of recommended alarms in Recommended alarms.

You are charged for the alarms that you create, at the same rate as any other alarms that you create in CloudWatch. Using the recommendations incurs no extra charges. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

Find and create recommended alarms

Follow these steps to find the metrics that CloudWatch recommends that you set alarms for, and optionally to create one of these alarms. The first procedure explains how to find the metrics that have recommended alarms, and how to create one of these alarms.

You can also get a bulk download of infrastructure-as-code alarm definitions for all recommended alarms in an AWS namespace, such as AWS/Lambda or AWS/S3. Those instructions are later in this topic.

To find the metrics with recommended alarms, and create a single recommended alarm

  1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Metrics, All metrics.

  3. Above the Metrics table, Choose Alarm recommendations.

    The list of metric namespaces is filtered to include only the metrics that have alarm recommendations and that services in your account are publishing.

  4. Choose the namespace for a service.

    The list of metrics under this namespace is filtered to include only those that have alarm recommendations.

  5. To see the alarm intent and recommended threshold for a metric, choose View details.

  6. To create an alarm for one of the metrics, do one of the following:

    • To use the console to create the alarm, do the following:

      1. Select the checkbox for the metric and choose the Graphed metrics tab.

      2. Choose the alarm icon.

        Create an alarm from a graphed metric

        The alarm creation wizard appears, with the metric name, statistic, and period filled in based on the alarm recommendation. If the recommendation includes a specific threshold value, that value is also pre-filled.

      3. Choose Next.

      4. Under Notification, select an SNS topic to notify when the alarm transitions to ALARM state, OK state, or INSUFFICIENT_DATA state.

        To have the alarm send multiple notifications for the same alarm state or for different alarm states, choose Add notification.

        To have the alarm not send notifications, choose Remove.

      5. To have the alarm perform Auto Scaling or EC2 actions, choose the appropriate button and choose the alarm state and action to perform.

      6. When finished, choose Next.

      7. Enter a name and description for the alarm. The name must contain only ASCII characters. Then choose Next.

      8. Under Preview and create, confirm that the information and conditions are what you want, then choose Create alarm.

    • To download an infrastructure-as-code alarm definition to use in either AWS CloudFormation, AWS CLI, or Terraform, choose Download alarm code and select the format that you want. The downloaded code will have the recommended settings for the metric name, statistic, and threshold.

To download infrastructure-as-code alarm definitions for all recommended alarms for an AWS service

  1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Metrics, All metrics.

  3. Above the Metrics table, Choose Alarm recommendations.

    The list of metric namespaces is filtered to include only the metrics that have alarm recommendations and that services in your account are publishing.

  4. Choose the namespace for a service.

    The list of metrics under this namespace is filtered to include only those that have alarm recommendations.

  5. The Download alarm code displays how many alarms are recommended for the metrics in this namespace. To download infrastructure-as-code alarm definitions for all recommended alarms, choose Download alarm code and then choose the code format that you want.