Disable AWS Cloudwatch alarm during normal working hours

Question

I want an alarm to operate only overnight between 18:00 and 08:00 so I can keep an EC2 instance running all the working day and stop overnight if no-one is using it. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Of course this is possible but you need to write your own script to imitate this scenario, there are ec2-api's available which will help you make this happen.

What you can do:

1. Write a cron script that will start/stop your instances.
2. Write a script that will take an input from cloudwatch to take a call on stopping the server if there no request for a n period.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can automate this by creating an EventBridge rule where you specify a cron or schedule expression that runs a Python lambda function on specific timings.

Then, you can use your Lambda function to enable or disable an alarm(s) according to your required schedules.

disable_alarm = client.disable_alarm_actions(AlarmNames=alarm_names)

Here's a good tutorial: https://medium.com/geekculture/terraform-structure-for-enabling-disabling-alarms-in-batches-5c4f165a8db7