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I set up an alarm to alert me if my AWS instance sends more than 100MB within an hour. Traffic last night caused the threshold to be crossed. But instead of getting one notification, my inbox got flooded with email notifications arriving every 5 minutes with the same alert. Parameters of the alarm are:

SUM of "Network Out" >= 100MB for 1 consecutive period of 1 hour

I would have assumed that an alarm would have at most sent a notification every hour. But every 5 minutes seems excessive. Do I have a misunderstanding of how alarm notifications work? Or should I have configured my alarm instance differently to avoid the flood of emails?

selbie
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2 Answers2

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Change your alarm period to a larger number. You may need to tweak other settings such as number of periods to check to compensate, depending how it's set up.

Cloudwatch Alarm Period

Tim
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Normal behavior is one single notification, and none thereafter, unless the alarm changes state. CloudWatch alarms don't trigger multiple notifications.

Add a notification for when the alarm state is OK and one for INSUFFCIENT_DATA.

This should show you why you were getting multiple notifications -- you were actually going in and out of alarm because you were close to the threshold or monitoring a time window that is too short to be stable.

Michael - sqlbot
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