Avoiding INSUFFICIENT DATA in Cloudwatch?

Question

I have alarms set up to tell me when my load balancers are throwing 5xxs using the HTTPCode_Backend_5XX metric with the sum statistic. The issue is

Answer 1

I asked for this in the AWS forums two years ago :-( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=153753&tstart=0

Unfortunately you cannot create notifications based on specific state changes (in your case you want a notification when state changes from ALARM to OK, but not when state changes from INSUFFICIENT to OK). I can only suggest that you also ask for it and hopefully it will eventually be added.

For metrics that are often in the INSUFFICIENT state I generally just create notifications for ALARMS and I don't have notifications on OK for these metrics - if I want to confirm that things are OK I use the AWS mobile app to check on things and see if they have resolved.