Creating alarms for metrics

In the CloudFront console, you can set alarms to notify you by Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) based on specific CloudFront metrics. You can set an alarm on the Alarms page in the CloudFront console.

To create an alarm in the console, specify the following values:

Metric

The metric for which you are creating the alarm.

Distribution

The CloudFront distribution for which you are creating the alarm.

Name of alarm

A name for the alarm.

Send a notification to

The Amazon SNS topic to send notification to if this metric triggers an alarm.

Whenever <metric> <operator> <value>

Specify when CloudWatch should trigger an alarm and send a notification to the Amazon SNS topic. For example, to receive a notification when the 5xx error rate exceeds 1%, specify the following:

Whenever Average of 5xxErrorRate > 1

Note the following about specifying values:

• Enter only whole numbers without punctuation. For example, to specify one thousand, enter 1000.

• For 4xx, 5xx, and total error rates, the value that you specify is a percentage.

• For requests, bytes downloaded, and bytes uploaded, the value that you specify is units. For example, 1073742000 bytes.

For at least <number> consecutive periods of <time period>

Specify how many consecutive time periods of the specified duration the metric must meet the criteria before CloudWatch triggers an alarm. When you choose a value, aim for an appropriate balance between a value that does not alarm for temporary or fleeting problems, but does alarm for sustained or real problems.