AWS CloudWatch: Configuring alerts for alarms

Rafael Natali
2 min readDec 13, 2018

Receive e-mails and/or SMS messages for alarms created with CloudWatch.

Let’s start with e-mail alerts. First, go to the AWS Simple Notification Services (SNS) service and create a new topic; Afterwards, you’ll subscribe the topic to a type ‘E-mail’ subscription.

E-mails listed in the ‘Endpoint’ field will receive a message to confirm the subscription to the topic.

As for SMS, from within the topic create a new subscription using the ‘Protocol: SMS’. In the endpoint field insert the phone number.

Currently, Amazon SNS supports SMS messaging in the following AWS Regions:

US East (N. Virginia)
US West (Oregon)
EU (Ireland)
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)
Asia Pacific (Sydney)

In the AWS CloudWatch create your alarm:

In the ‘Actions’ choose the SNS topic created before:

In this example, every time the alarm state changed to ALARM the SNS topic will receive a message and then all e-mails and telephones that subscribe to that topic.

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