We build dashboards to see what's happening. We build alarms so we don't have to look at the dashboards. On Day 37 of my Cloud Journey, I focused on Alerting Strategies. My AI Finance Agent is now fully autonomous, but autonomy requires supervision.
The Strategy
I set up two layers of defense:
Operational Alarms (CloudWatch): Immediate reaction to code failures.
Financial Alarms (AWS Budgets): Proactive reaction to cost anomalies.
Setting up the Error Alarm
I navigated to Amazon CloudWatch and created a new Alarm based on the Lambda Errors metric.
Threshold: Sum > 0 (Zero Tolerance).
Period: 1 Hour.
Action: Trigger my existing SNS Topic (FinanceAgent-Alerts).
This effectively recycles my notification infrastructure. The same system that sends me "High Spending Alerts" now sends me "System Crash Alerts."
Financial Safety Net
GenAI can be expensive if a loop goes wrong. I used AWS Budgets to set a fixed monthly cap. AWS forecasts my usage based on current trends and alerts me before I hit the limit, not after.
Conclusion
The goal of DevOps isn't just to deploy code faster; it's to reduce the cognitive load of running that code. By automating the monitoring, I freed up my mental RAM for the next feature.
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