Recently I had the following problem, a CloudWatch Alarm based on the Error-Metric of a critical Lambda Function occasionaly caused notifications.

The reason for the notifications was quickly found through a search in the lambda logs. The errors were caused by lambda timeouts. Since lambda timeouts are not critical in the utilised architecture I was looking for a way to ignore them in the CloudWatch Alarms.

The solution is called Metric Math.

Metric math enables you to query multiple CloudWatch metrics and use math expressions to create new time series based on these metrics.

Source: Using Metric Math by AWS

Herewith it is possible to create a new metric excluding the timeouts by subtracting timeouts from errors. By default there is no metric for timeouts within lambda functions. But this metric can be extracted with a simple Metric Filter applied to the loggroup of the respective lambda function:

Then a CloudWatch Alarm can be created with a mathematical expression:

In the CloudWatch console the result of the template looks like this: