Nagios has a nice feature called passive checks. You can define a passive service and configure a "freshness_threshold". That works great for regular jobs (i.e. backup jobs or similar) where the admin only needs to be warned if the job did not run.
So this works effectively like a "dead man's switch". As long as everything is fine, the administrator gets no alert at all. Only when the job did not run for a certain time, the alert is triggered.
I tried to find a similar functionality in AWS CloudWatch without success. Can CloudWatch Alerts be configured to work similar to this?