Yeah and that feels like a hack to me. What generates the events on the right cadence to trigger this Lambda alarm? Why not just have that run the Lambda? And why not just have that run the code like cron?

I know it works and it fills a gap for people but it just feels odd to me. It's like there is cron -> log -> monitor -> alarm -> event -> lambda -> script when you could just have cron -> script.

I'm probably just hung up on the naming and the fact that these events are branded as part of Cloudwatch. If there was some service spun off that just generated events in AWS I wouldn't raise an eyebrow, even if under the hood it was exactly the same thing.