Integration: Amazon CloudWatch Alarm

You need to set up an Amazon SNS topic for this integration!

Amazon CloudWatch provides metrics that you can observe with alarms. Once a metric reaches a threshold, the alarm can trigger an action.

I will show you how you can monitor your AWS bill. If your bill goes above a certain threshold, an event is sent to marbot that triggers an alert. You can not only monitor your AWS bill in CloudWatch. CloudWatch provides much more!

Monitoring your AWS bill with a CloudWatch Alarm

1. Visit https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/home?region=us-east-1
2. Ensure that you are in the N. Virgina region
3. Click on the Alarm link on the left
4. Click on the Create Alarm button
5. Click on the Total Estimated Charge metric under Billing Metrics
6. Select the only line

You should now see the following screen:

1. Click on the Next button on the bottom
2. Set a Name and a Description for the alarm
3. Set the threshold to $0 to ensure that the alarm is triggered (for test purposes only, you can change this later)
4. In the actions section at the bottom, set Send notification to the SNS topic you created, e.g. marbot.
5. Save by clicking the Create alarm button.

Sample Alert

Within a minute you should receive an alert in Slack:

Auto-close

A CloudWatch Alarm can be in one of three states:

• OK
• ALARM
• INSUFFICIENT_DATA

If a CloudWatch Alarm is in the state ALARM or INSUFFICIENT_DATA I will create a new alert for you. If a CloudWatch Alarm is in the state OK I will search for a related alert and close it for you. An auto-closed alert will look like this:

Namespaces with Quick Links

marbot enriches the following AWS-supported namespaces with Quick Links for fast access to resources in the AWS UI.