How to setup email alerts to my cloudwatch alarms

Question

I have setup an alarm for CPU util. above 33% for 5 consecutive 1 minute periods. Now I am unable to add an email alert as the steps are complicated with many branches, for a seemingly straightforward step like setting a notification email.

Can someone just give standard steps how to setup a gmail account to receive the alerts?

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch uses Amazon SNS to send email. First, create and subscribe to an SNS topic. When you create a CloudWatch alarm, you can add this SNS topic to send an email notification when the alarm changes state. If you plan to create your CloudWatch alarm using the AWS Management Console, you can create the SNS topic when you create the alarm.

To get started with SNS, refer to Setting up Amazon SNS notifications.

For an example walk through of creating an alarm integrated with SNS, refer to Create a CloudWatch alarm based on a static threshold.

To get started with SNS, refer to [Setting up Amazon SNS notifications](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/US_SetupSNS.html).

For an example walk through of creating an alarm integrated with SNS, refer to [Create a CloudWatch alarm based on a static threshold](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/ConsoleAlarms.html).

How to setup email alerts to my cloudwatch alarms

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