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I am new to AWS. I have a very basic question that needs binary answer.

Situation:

I've been using API Gateway, Lambda Functions, DynamoDB for about 3 weeks now. I use cloudwatch logs but never created any alarms. I'm not sure if any of these services automatically creates an alarm. I created a new DynamoDb table and I saw Cloudwatch Alarms under Insufficient category were created. I'm not sure which of these things (Alarm, Insufficiend, OK) goes off and charges me money.

My questions:

  1. Can CloudWatch Alarms be created automatically (as by evidence it can be)?
  2. If i delete automatically created alarms, will they be created automatically?
  3. If i delete an alarm, will i be charged for it (I guess, no)?

Automatic creation of alarms is what messed me up.

AnoNym
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1 Answers1

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  1. Yes there are services such as Elastic Beanstalk [1] which create alarms automatically.
    Beanstalk for examples provisions an underlying CloudFormation stack which includes a CloudWatch alarm to trigger scaling actions for Load-balancing, Autoscaling Environments [2]. However, it is difficult to tell which services are doing this since there are so many AWS services right now. I think, everything autoscaling-related might create an alarm for you... Maybe if you edit you question and include the metrics which are observed by the alarm, I could tell you what might have created it.

  2. Most likely not. That depends on how they have been created. If they were created by CloudFormation, then they are usually not recreated, but keep in mind that future stack updates might fail.

  3. You won't be charged for the alarm after you delete it. However, I think an alarm is billed on a monthly basis. So it is billed once (for the month it was created). After you delete it, it is not considered in the next/upcoming monthly bill. You have a free tier of 10 non-high resolution CloudWatch alarms which are not billed. [3]

References

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo.cloudwatch.html
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features-managing-env-types.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/de/cloudwatch/pricing/

Martin Löper
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