title: Avoiding INSUFFICIENT DATA in Cloudwatch?
body: <p>I have alarms set up to tell me when my load balancers are throwing 5xxs using the <code>HTTPCode_Backend_5XX</code> metric with the <code>sum</code> statistic. The issue is that <code>sum</code> registers 0 as no data points, so when no 5xxs are thrown, the alarm is treated as insufficient data. This is especially frustrating, because I have SNS setup to notify me whenever we get too many 5xxs (alarm state) and whenever things go back to normal. Annoyingly, 0 5xxs means we're in <code>INSUFFICIENT DATA</code> status, but 1 5xx means we're in <code>OK</code> status, so 1 5xx triggers everyone getting notified that stuff is OK. Is there any way around this? Ideally, I'd like to just have 0 of anything show up as a zero data point instead of no data at all (insufficient data).</p>