I would like to create a CloudWatch alarm that sends an email when I forgot to delete my RDS instance after use. So I only want an alarm that triggers when the RDS instance is available. My initial approach is the following:
Create an alarm based on "CPUUtilization" and have it trigger when the utilization has on average been between 0 and 1 percent for about 1 or 2 hours.
However, until now I can only state 1 constraint. What I mean is that I can have the alarm trigger when the utilization is below 1 percent for about 1 or 2 hours. But this means that it will also trigger when the instance has been deleted.
Can anyone help me figuring out how to tackle this problem?
If you stop your RDS instance, it will stop publishing metrics. Your alarm will go into INSUFFICIENT_DATA state, so your ALARM actions won't be executed.
More about CloudWatch Alarms here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/AlarmThatSendsEmail.html