CloudWatch Alarms

This post is part of a bigger topic Autoscaling Publishers in AWS.

Autoscaling works based on some metrics. For Tridion Publishers we are going to define a Publish_Alarm in CloudWatch that uses the custom metric Waiting for Publish in order to trigger the alarm or not.

The alarm defines a threshold that, if passed, sets its state to ALARM. Otherwise, if the metric is below, it sets the state to OK.

Based on these states, one can define the Scaling Policies of an Auto Scale Group (more about this in a later post).

We are going to create an alarm that monitors the custom metric Waiting for Publish. In the first screen of creating the alarm, we select this metric.

On the second screen, we specify the threshold and the duration it takes to consider this alarm triggered. For example, I used a threshold of 1000 items that has to be surpassed for 3 consecutive readings (each reading happening at 1 minute interval).

We leave the Actions section empty for now. We will enter here the details of the Scaling Policy later.

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