# Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
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You can set up alarms using [Amazon CloudWatch alarms](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/AlarmThatSendsEmail.html) based on the metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch metrics. The alarm can then send a notification to Amazon SNS topic, or initiate Auto Scaling actions. An alarm requires period (length of the time to evaluate a metric), evaluation period (number of the most recent data points), and datapoints to alarm (number of data points within the evaluation period).