Creating CloudWatch alarms to monitor Amazon RDS

You can create a CloudWatch alarm that sends an Amazon SNS message when the alarm changes state. An alarm watches a single metric over a time period that you specify. The alarm can also perform one or more actions based on the value of the metric relative to a given threshold over a number of time periods. The action is a notification sent to an Amazon SNS topic or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy.

Alarms invoke actions for sustained state changes only. CloudWatch alarms don't invoke actions simply because they are in a particular state. The state must have changed and have been maintained for a specified number of time periods.

You can use the DB_PERF_INSIGHTS metric math function in the CloudWatch console to query Amazon RDS for Performance Insights counter metrics. The DB_PERF_INSIGHTS function also includes the DBLoad metric at sub-minute intervals. You can set CloudWatch alarms on these metrics.

For more details on how to create an alarm, see Create an alarm on Performance Insights counter metrics from an AWS database.

To set an alarm using the AWS CLI

• Call put-metric-alarm. For more information, see AWS CLI Command Reference.

To set an alarm using the CloudWatch API

• Call PutMetricAlarm. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch API Reference

For more information about setting up Amazon SNS topics and creating alarms, see Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms.