Question

A CloudOps engineer manages a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The team wants an automated response when average CPU utilization across the Auto Scaling group exceeds 70% for 5 minutes: the group should add capacity, and the on-call team should be notified via email. The engineer creates a CloudWatch alarm on the ASGAverageCPUUtilization metric. Which combination of alarm actions should be configured to meet BOTH requirements with the least custom code?

Accepted Answer

Add an Auto Scaling policy action and an SNS topic notification action to the same CloudWatch alarm, with the on-call team subscribed to the SNS topic.

Answer

Configure the alarm to invoke a Lambda function that both calls the Auto Scaling API to add instances and sends an email via Amazon SES.

Answer

Create two separate alarms on the same metric: one with an Auto Scaling action and one with an SNS action, each with different thresholds.

Answer

Attach only an SNS action to the alarm and configure an EventBridge rule on the SNS delivery event to trigger the scaling policy.