How to get CloudWatch to send an alarm every time a threshold has been breached?

Question

Currently using this script to monitor:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html

When the script is first run we receive the email, but after that the email never sends (even though the threshold has been breached continuously).

Answer 1

Amazon CloudWatch alarms will only trigger notifications when the state of the Alarm changes. It will not continuously send alarms when the state is Alert and it is not possible to configure such behavior.

One exception to this is triggering Auto Scaling changes -- it will continually try to trigger an Auto Scaling policy while the state is in Alarm.