title: AWS Cloudwatch Heartbeat Alarm
body: <p>I have an app that puts a custom Cloudwatch metric to AWS every minute. This is supposed to act as a heartbeat so I know the app is alive.</p>
  
  <p>Now I want to put an alarm on this metric to notify me if the heartbeat stops. I have tried to accomplish this using different cloudwatch alarm statistics including "average" and "data samples" and setting an alarm threshold less than 1 over a given period. However, in all cases, if my app dies and stops reporting the heartbeat, the alarm will only go into an "Insufficient Data" state and never into an "Alarm" state.</p>
  
  <p>I understand I can put a notification on the "Insufficient Data" state, but I want this to show up as an alarm. Is this possible in Cloudwatch?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>Matt</p>