Amazon EC2 AutoScaling CPUUtilization Alarm- INSUFFICIENT DATA

Question

So I've been using Boto in Python to try and configure autoscaling based on CPUUtilization, more or less exactly as specified in this example: http://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/autoscale_tut.html

However both alarms in CloudWatch just report:

State Details: State changed to 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA' at 2012/11/12 16:30 UTC. Reason: Unchecked: Initial alarm creation

Auto scaling is working fine but the alarms aren't picking up any CPUUtilization data at all. Any ideas for things I can try?

Edit: The instance itself reports CPU utilisation data, just not when I try and create an alarm in CloudWatch, programatically in python or in the interface. Detailed monitoring is also enabled just in case...

Thanks!

Answer 1

The official answer from AWS goes like this:

Hi, There is an inherent delay in transitioning into INSUFFICIENT_DATA state (only) as alarms wait for a period of time to compensate for metric generation latency. For an alarm with a 60 second period, the delay before transition into I_D state will be between 5 and 10 minutes.

John.

Apparently this is a temporary state and will likely resolve itself.