CloudWatch is a service on AWS that is used to monitor services on AWS via metrics.  In addition to monitoring resources.  CloudWatch can be used to set alarms and perform some actions on the instance when a certain condition is met.  In this post we are going to set an alarm on our instance if CPU utilization gets to a certain threshold.  Which is a typical safeguard that most environments have, there are several actions that you can take when the threshold is met, in our case we are going to terminate the instance if the CPU utilization reaches 75%. 

The following shows you how to set a CloudWatch alarm on our Linux instance:

1. Click on "Monitoring" tab in the "Instances" page, then click on the "Create Alarm" button