Effective CloudWatch alarming

This post is not about setting up CloudWatch alarms. You can find it on Google easily. Instead, I am going to talk about how to set up alarms that can make you sleep well at night.

It is my journey of setting up alarms for my company’s website. It may not be a brilliant solution, but I think it is simple enough to give you some insight without considering complex architectures.

Background

My company had a web server that always goes down when there are traffic spikes. The website is not so important that it deserves a…