09. Alerting

Proper alerting will help you keep tabs on your systems and will help you meet your SLAs. Alerting in ways that bring attention to important issues will keep everyone informed and prevent your customers from being the ones to inform you of problems. CloudWatch Alarms integrates with CloudWatch Metrics. Any metric in CloudWatch can be used as the basis for an alarm. These alarms are sent to SNS topics, and from there, you have a whole variety of options for distributing information such as email, text message, Lambda invocation or third party integration.

Alerting when problems occur is critical, but alerting when problems are about to occur is far better. Understanding the design and architecture of your platform is key to being able to set thresholds correctly. You want to set your thresholds so that your systems are quiet when the load is within their capacity, but to start speaking up when they head toward exceeding their capacity. You will need to determine how much advanced warning you will need to fix issues.