This is a totally out of date lesson – The Alarm creation and monitoring checks have changed totally, nothing in this lesson is equal to what is in Amazon monitoring at the moment.

On the top of the screen, you should have a pop alert proposing to try their new interface. If you opt-in to try their new interface, it will look like exactly the same as in the course. 

I have used the ACloudGuru AWS sandbox, I have launched an EC2 instance, created a SNS topic, and created the CloudWatch alarm as shown in the course. And it worked.