title: How to tell if a kinesis stream is not being processed
body: <p>When processing an AWS Kinesis stream, how to tell if a consumer is no longer processing the stream? Is there a metric in Kinesis that I can use for alarming for example?</p>
  <p>There is a metric for <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/monitoring-with-cloudwatch.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">IteratorAgeMilliseconds</a> however, this metric is only written when a stream is being processed. So in case a consumer is down and the stream is backing up with messages, we would know that this happened only when we resume processing.</p>