How to get CloudWatch to send an alarm every time a threshold has been breached?

3
votes

Currently using this script to monitor:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html

When the script is first run we receive the email, but after that the email never sends (even though the threshold has been breached continuously).

2
emailamazon-web-servicesalarmamazon-cloudwatch
You want it to keep sending emails every time the metric is updated? Most people don't want to get a duplicate email every 5 minutes. You generally get an alert email and assume the alert is ongoing until you receive another email that the metric has fallen below the threshold. – Mark B
It's plausible that we'll miss an email though. – Adz

2 Answers

7
votes

Amazon CloudWatch alarms will only trigger notifications when the state of the Alarm changes. It will not continuously send alarms when the state is Alert and it is not possible to configure such behavior.

One exception to this is triggering Auto Scaling changes -- it will continually try to trigger an Auto Scaling policy while the state is in Alarm.

-1
votes

This is an example of a custom metrics that reset itself every hour: Custom CloudWatch metrics with hourly reset. Therefore, the notifications are also repeated every hour, if the alarm has not been resolved.