A municipal payment portal must page on-call staff when HTTP 5xx rises and also when successful payment count stays at zero for fifteen minutes during office hours. How should the city developer design CloudWatch alerting?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Alarming like a fire panel that watches smoke and a silent cash register—both matter. Pair the usual 5xx technical signal with a business metric that payments still succeed during office hours, or quiet failures slip past. That combo catches broken tech and a healthy-looking API that stopped taking money.
Full Explanation
Effective operational alerting for citizen-facing payment flows combines technical error signals (for example HTTP 5xx) with business outcome metrics such as successful payment count. Scoping the business alarm to office hours reduces overnight noise while still detecting silent outages when volume should be non-zero. Duration-only alarms, weekly spreadsheets, or forcing 100% tracing do not provide timely, actionable coverage of both failure modes.