Can I define an EC2 auto scale group with scaling policies without adding alarms to CloudWatch dashboard?

Question

I followed the instructions on http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/as-scale-based-on-demand.html in order to have a CPUUtilization based auto scale group. i noticed that the alarms created by mon-put-metric-alarm create alarms that are listed on the cloudwatch dashboard. This means that on low cpu utlilization I always have a metric in ALARM state. Can I hide the auto scale metrics in the CloudWatch web interface?

Answer 1

Interesting question (+1) - I'm not aware of any option to hide the auto scale metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch web interface and the respective PutMetricAlarm API action doesn't feature a related option either.

While your use case is sound, the AWS team usually follows the Minimum viable product approach when implementing a new service initially, and despite steadily adding additional features later on, they still tend to obey the Pareto principle when choosing worthwhile features, so I doubt that your understandable request will be implemented anytime soon.