CloudWatch Logs, Metric Filters, and Alarms
Convert Lambda ERROR log lines into a custom CloudWatch metric, alarm on the metric to SNS, and combine multiple alarms into a composite alarm for production-grade alerting.
Lab Overview
Application logs contain the richest signal for what is going wrong, but raw log lines do not page on-call engineers. CloudWatch metric filters bridge that gap: they extract patterns from log groups and emit them as numeric metrics that alarms and dashboards can consume.
In this lab you will:
- Deploy a Lambda function that emits a mix of INFO and ERROR-level structured logs and invoke it to generate log activity
- Create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter on the Lambda log group that counts `ERROR` lines and publishes them as a custom metric
- Create a CloudWatch alarm on that metric (>5 errors in 5 minutes), notify an SNS topic with an email subscription, and trigger the alarm by forcing more errors
- Build a composite alarm that combines the error-count alarm with a Lambda duration alarm, then trigger both child alarms to watch the composite fire
Everything runs inside a TeKanAid-provisioned AWS lab account using only confirmed-tier services (Lambda, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch metrics and alarms, SNS, IAM).
What You'll Learn
Create a Lambda function with an IAM execution role and emit structured logs to CloudWatch Logs
Define a CloudWatch Logs metric filter that converts ERROR log lines into a custom metric
Create a CloudWatch metric alarm with an SNS action and email subscription
Combine multiple metric alarms into a composite alarm using rule expressions
Trigger alarm state transitions and verify end-to-end alerting
Prerequisites
aws-devops-cli-operations-baseline
basic-iam-and-lambda-familiarity
Technologies Covered
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