Request Parameters Errors Examples See Also

SetAlarmState

Temporarily sets the state of an alarm for testing purposes. When the updated state differs from the previous value, the action configured for the appropriate state is invoked. For example, if your alarm is configured to send an Amazon SNS message when an alarm is triggered, temporarily changing the alarm state to ALARM sends an SNS message.

Metric alarms returns to their actual state quickly, often within seconds. Because the metric alarm state change happens quickly, it is typically only visible in the alarm's History tab in the Amazon CloudWatch console or through DescribeAlarmHistory.

If you use SetAlarmState on a composite alarm, the composite alarm is not guaranteed to return to its actual state. It returns to its actual state only once any of its children alarms change state. It is also reevaluated if you update its configuration.

If an alarm triggers EC2 Auto Scaling policies or application Auto Scaling policies, you must include information in the StateReasonData parameter to enable the policy to take the correct action.

Request Parameters

For information about the parameters that are common to all actions, see Common Parameters.

AlarmName

The name of the alarm.

Type: String

Length Constraints: Minimum length of 1. Maximum length of 255.

Required: Yes

StateReason

The reason that this alarm is set to this specific state, in text format.

Type: String

Length Constraints: Minimum length of 0. Maximum length of 1023.

Required: Yes

StateReasonData

The reason that this alarm is set to this specific state, in JSON format.

For SNS or EC2 alarm actions, this is just informational. But for EC2 Auto Scaling or application Auto Scaling alarm actions, the Auto Scaling policy uses the information in this field to take the correct action.

Type: String

Length Constraints: Minimum length of 0. Maximum length of 4000.

Required: No

StateValue

The value of the state.

Type: String

Valid Values: OK | ALARM | INSUFFICIENT_DATA

Required: Yes

Errors

For information about the errors that are common to all actions, see Common Errors.

InvalidFormat

Data was not syntactically valid JSON.

HTTP Status Code: 400

ResourceNotFound

The named resource does not exist.

HTTP Status Code: 404

Examples

Example

The following example sets the alarm state to ALARM, and provides information inside of StateReasonData so that Auto Scaling actions can be performed correctly according to your Auto Scaling policies.


{
    "AlarmName": "ExampleAlarmName",
    "StateValue": "ALARM",
    "StateReason": "Testing Alarm State",
    "StateReasonData": {
        "Version": "1.0",
        "QueryDate": "2018-10-31T14:32:52.031+0000",
        "StartDate": "2018-10-31T14:31:00.000+0000",
        "Statistic": "Average",
        "Period": 60,
        "RecentDatapoints": [
            100
        ],
        "Threshold": 50
    }
}