Boto

Creating AWS Cloudwatch Alarms Using Boto

In this post I’ll walk through the process of setting up cloudwatch alarms programatically in Python through Boto. We’ll be setting up a single alarm for a metric StatusCheckFailed, but you can configure other alarms as well. Check the AWS alarms console for the full list.

This post assumes you already have an instance, instance_id, AWS, and your boto config set up. Also assumed is that you’ve created a SNS Topic already. My SNS Topic is called “Server_Down”, and is simply an email that gets sent to me when a server fails a status check.