Question

A DevOps team runs a three-tier web application. Their monitoring setup fires individual CloudWatch alarms for high database CPU, elevated API latency, and increased 5xx errors. During a recent database maintenance event, all three alarms triggered simultaneously, paging the on-call engineer three separate times for what was fundamentally a single underlying issue. The team wants to be paged only once when the database problem causes cascading symptoms, while still keeping the individual alarms for dashboards and troubleshooting. Which approach best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch composite alarm using an alarm rule that combines the child alarms with logical operators, and configure only the composite alarm to send the SNS notification to the on-call topic.

Answer

Delete the three individual alarms and create a single metric math alarm that averages database CPU, latency, and error count into one metric before evaluating a threshold.

Answer

Add all three alarms to the same SNS topic but enable SNS message filtering so only the first message within a five-minute window is delivered.

Answer

Configure each alarm's actions with a longer evaluation period and increase the datapoints-to-alarm value so the alarms rarely trigger together.