Question

A SysOps administrator manages an e-commerce application whose request rate follows a strong daily and weekly pattern, peaking during lunchtime and dropping overnight. A static CloudWatch alarm on the RequestCount metric currently generates many false alarms overnight (threshold too high) and misses real problems during peaks (threshold too low). The administrator needs an approach that automatically adjusts expected values based on time-of-day and day-of-week patterns while still alerting on genuine deviations. What should the administrator do?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch anomaly detection model on the RequestCount metric and configure the alarm to trigger when the metric falls outside the anomaly detection band.

Answer

Configure multiple static threshold alarms, one for each hour of the day, using CloudWatch composite alarms to combine them.

Answer

Enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring on the resource to reduce the metric period to one minute so the static threshold becomes more accurate.

Answer

Create a metric math expression that averages RequestCount over 24 hours and alarm when the current value exceeds that average.