Create CloudWatch alarm on multiple SQS queues

Question

Suppose I have N EC2 instances in auto-scaling group, each of them is polling M SQS queues. How would I create an alarm on cumulative ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible across all SQS queues if possible?

Answer 1

There is no cumulative count of the visible messages metric available as of now.

Here is how you can solve it,

Create a Lambda/ cron job that can poll the queues, get ApproximateNumberOfMessages on each queue and update the total messages to a custom Cloudwatch Metric.

QueueAttributes:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/APIReference/API_GetQueueAttributes.html

Custom Cloudwatch Metric:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/publishingMetrics.html

You can either create a lambda (serverless) or if you want to server based, you can poll and update total count into a custom cloudwatch metric with cli to AWS cloudwatch.

Once you have have the cloudwatch metric, you can create an alarm based on those numbers.

Hope it helps.