All checks
High
CloudWatch alarms should have specified actions configured
Verifies that CloudWatch metric alarms have at least one action for the ALARM state, so a breached threshold notifies someone or triggers a response. Actions for the OK or INSUFFICIENT_DATA states, or on a composite alarm that contains this one, do not count.
- service
- CloudWatch
- severity
- High
- scope
- evaluated in every region
How to fix it
- Affects another check: An ALARM action does nothing while the alarm's actions are switched off, which CloudWatch.17 checks separately.
In the console
CloudWatch → Alarms → the alarm → Actions → Edit → Configure actions
- Alarm state trigger
- In alarm
- Notification
- An SNS topic to notify, or instead an Auto Scaling, EC2, Lambda or Systems Manager action
With Terraform
resource "aws_cloudwatch_metric_alarm" "this" {
alarm_name = var.alarm_name
comparison_operator = var.comparison_operator
evaluation_periods = var.evaluation_periods
metric_name = var.metric_name
actions_enabled = true
alarm_actions = [aws_sns_topic.alerts.arn]
}See which of your accounts this check is failing on.
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