Avoiding INSUFFICIENT DATA in Cloudwatch?

Question

I have alarms set up to tell me when my load balancers are throwing 5xxs using the HTTPCode_Backend_5XX metric with the sum statistic. The issue is

Answer 1

We had a similar issue for some of our alarms. You can actually avoid this behaviour with some work, if you really want to deal with the overhead.

What we have done is, instead of sending SNS notifications directly to e-mails, we have created a lambda function and triggered it once we have the notification in the SNS topic.

This way, you will have more control over the actions you can take once the alarms are triggered. As the context will provide you old state value as well.

The good news is, there is already a lambda template to get started. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-slack-integration-blueprints-for-aws-lambda/

Just pick the one that is designed to send cloudwatch alarms to slack. You can then modify the code as you wish, either dismiss the slack part and just use emails, or keep it with slack. (which is what we did and it works like a charm)