Some useful settings for Amazon SNS + CloudWatch email notifications

Hello, this is UZI from the System Solutions Department

The theme of this blog is

● Disable unsubscribe setting for SNS topic

This is about

For example, if you specify email as the notification destination for a subscription set up in an SNS topic, and you set that SNS topic as the notification destination for a CloudWatch metric alarm, AWS will notify you by email if there is an abnormality in the metric

This time, we will introduce a setting that will prevent email notifications that are enabled (subscription status) from being accidentally disabled (unsubscribed)

What is unsubscribe?

"Unsubscribe" means to cancel the subscription set for the SNS topic

Specifically, simply clicking the link in the email in the red box will unsubscribe you !

● Email from SNS topic

● Subscription canceled screen

The problem with being unsubscribed

If someone accidentally presses it, they'll never receive any notifications again unless they subscribe again..

What if the notification email informed you that you had accidentally cancelled the service, which delayed the discovery of an abnormality in your content, or that you were being charged a flat-rate fee?

This could result in lost opportunities for customers, and when customers look at their AWS bill, they could be faced with a huge bill...a terrifying situation

● Before canceling your subscription

Before canceling the subscription, the ID was displayed

● After cancellation..

It will show as deleted

● Cancellation notification email

You will also receive an email notification of your unsubscription (a nice touch).
You can also re-subscribe by clicking " Resubscribe in the email

● Screen after resubscription

Disable unsubscribe setting

Well, that was a long introduction, but let's move on to : disabling the unsubscribe setting

You should receive a confirmation email to the email address you specified as the endpoint when creating the subscription

Copy the Confirm subscription link in the email without clicking

 

Then select the subscription you are trying to create (which is in a pending confirmation state) and click Confirm Subscription. A pop-up will appear asking you to confirm your subscription

Paste the URL you copied there and click Confirm Subscription

・
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you have now disabled unsubscribe

I actually sent a message from the subscription section and clicked on the unsubscribe link in the email I received..

As shown in the image, it says "Unable to unsubscribe" 👏👏

Disable existing SNS topics

Unfortunately, it seems that it is not possible to disable the unsubscribe setting for existing SNS subscriptions..

There seem to be two alternatives:

Details are introduced in the article below, so if you're interested, please take a look!

• Delete an existing SNS subscription and create a new SNS subscription as soon as possible
• Temporarily add an SNS subscription for another endpoint to receive notifications while you are working on "Delete → New"

○ See: An SNS topic cannot have multiple SNS subscriptions with the same endpoint associated with it.

summary

This concludes our introduction to disabling the unsubscribe setting for SNS topics

I hope this will be helpful when building and configuring monitoring using SNS on AWS

Until next time,