Request Parameters Response Elements Errors See Also

DescribeAlarms

Retrieves the specified alarms. You can filter the results by specifying a prefix for the alarm name, the alarm state, or a prefix for any action.

To use this operation and return information about composite alarms, you must be signed on with the cloudwatch:DescribeAlarms permission that is scoped to *. You can't return information about composite alarms if your cloudwatch:DescribeAlarms permission has a narrower scope.

Request Parameters

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

ActionPrefix

Use this parameter to filter the results of the operation to only those alarms that use a certain alarm action. For example, you could specify the ARN of an SNS topic to find all alarms that send notifications to that topic.

Type: String

Length Constraints: Minimum length of 1. Maximum length of 1024.

Required: No

AlarmNamePrefix

An alarm name prefix. If you specify this parameter, you receive information about all alarms that have names that start with this prefix.

If this parameter is specified, you cannot specify AlarmNames.

Type: String

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

Required: No

AlarmNames.member.N

The names of the alarms to retrieve information about.

Type: Array of strings

Array Members: Maximum number of 100 items.

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

Required: No

AlarmTypes.member.N

Use this parameter to specify whether you want the operation to return metric alarms or composite alarms. If you omit this parameter, only metric alarms are returned, even if composite alarms exist in the account.

For example, if you omit this parameter or specify MetricAlarms, the operation returns only a list of metric alarms. It does not return any composite alarms, even if composite alarms exist in the account.

If you specify CompositeAlarms, the operation returns only a list of composite alarms, and does not return any metric alarms.

Type: Array of strings

Valid Values: CompositeAlarm | MetricAlarm

Required: No

ChildrenOfAlarmName

If you use this parameter and specify the name of a composite alarm, the operation returns information about the "children" alarms of the alarm you specify. These are the metric alarms and composite alarms referenced in the AlarmRule field of the composite alarm that you specify in ChildrenOfAlarmName. Information about the composite alarm that you name in ChildrenOfAlarmName is not returned.

If you specify ChildrenOfAlarmName, you cannot specify any other parameters in the request except for MaxRecords and NextToken. If you do so, you receive a validation error.

Note

Only the Alarm Name, ARN, StateValue (OK/ALARM/INSUFFICIENT_DATA), and StateUpdatedTimestamp information are returned by this operation when you use this parameter. To get complete information about these alarms, perform another DescribeAlarms operation and specify the parent alarm names in the AlarmNames parameter.

Type: String

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

Required: No

MaxRecords

The maximum number of alarm descriptions to retrieve.

Type: Integer

Valid Range: Minimum value of 1. Maximum value of 100.

Required: No

NextToken

The token returned by a previous call to indicate that there is more data available.

Type: String

Required: No

ParentsOfAlarmName

If you use this parameter and specify the name of a metric or composite alarm, the operation returns information about the "parent" alarms of the alarm you specify. These are the composite alarms that have AlarmRule parameters that reference the alarm named in ParentsOfAlarmName. Information about the alarm that you specify in ParentsOfAlarmName is not returned.

If you specify ParentsOfAlarmName, you cannot specify any other parameters in the request except for MaxRecords and NextToken. If you do so, you receive a validation error.

Note

Only the Alarm Name and ARN are returned by this operation when you use this parameter. To get complete information about these alarms, perform another DescribeAlarms operation and specify the parent alarm names in the AlarmNames parameter.

Type: String

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

Required: No

StateValue

Specify this parameter to receive information only about alarms that are currently in the state that you specify.

Type: String

Valid Values: OK | ALARM | INSUFFICIENT_DATA

Required: No

Response Elements

The following elements are returned by the service.

CompositeAlarms.member.N

The information about any composite alarms returned by the operation.

Type: Array of CompositeAlarm objects

MetricAlarms.member.N

The information about any metric alarms returned by the operation.

Type: Array of MetricAlarm objects

NextToken

The token that marks the start of the next batch of returned results.

Type: String

Errors

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

InvalidNextToken

The next token specified is invalid.

HTTP Status Code: 400