Amazon Lightsail proposes resource monitoring, alarming and notifications

Amazon Lightsail now offers resource monitoring, alarming and notifications. You can now assign starting point for each of the monitored metrics for Amazon Lightsail instances, load balancers and databases, and be notified if the thresholds are exceeded via email and SMS notifications. This new launch will let you understand the health of your Lightsail infrastructure, and be notified if there are any difficulties. At most 2 alarms per metric can be stated on instances, load balancers and databases. For example, one alarm could be used as an alert and the other alarm could pop when it has exceeded a critical threshold. To create the alarm, you only need to choose the metric you require to alarm on, a threshold value for the metric to exceed and how long the metric requires to overshoot the threshold value to trigger the alarm. When an alarm is violated, a warning flag is appeared in the Lightsail console. Besides, you can select to get notifications through email and/or SMS text message using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Email address and SMS contact numbers can be supplied on a region by region basis, and not all regions support SMS text messaging (read documentation for details). No extra charges are applied on this new feature. To get more information, read documentation on how to create your first set of alarms.

Now AWS Chatbot helps executing commands from Slack (beta)

AWS Chatbot is an interactive AWS service agent which makes it simple to observe and communicate with your AWS resources in your Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms. You can get alerts and execute commands to return diagnostic data, call AWS Lambda functions, and produce AWS support cases so that your team can cooperate and answer to events immediately using AWS Chatbot. AWS Chatbot handles AWS service notifications from Amazon SNS, and sends them to Amazon Chime and Slack chat rooms so teams can examine and take action on them straight away, no matter of location. Now AWS Chatbot assists executing AWS commands and tasks from Slack. AWS Chatbot guides commands with the help of common AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) syntax that you can use from Slack on desktop or mobile devices. Additionally by executing commands, you can fetch Amazon CloudWatch logs by only selecting the “Show logs” button on CloudWatch Alarms notifications in Slack. AWS Chatbot helps tasks for showing logs for AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. To begin with commands, configure AWS Chatbot with Slack in the AWS Chatbot console with the predefined IAM policy templates and type “@aws help“ in the Slack channel. If you already utilize AWS Chatbot for sending notifications to Slack, you will require to design a new IAM role or update the current one with more permissions to activate executing commands. You can check blog post that gives you a step-by-step guide to assists you begin with executing commands in AWS Chatbot. To get the further information on AWS Chatbot, refer documentation

Amazon SNS Offers Assistance For Cost Allocation Tags

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service which coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients. Amazon SNS is a highly available, durable, secure, completely organized pub/sub messaging service which allows you decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SNS gives topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Now you can utilize cost allocation tags to handle your Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) costs. Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs which allows you classify SNS subjects to smartly notice their objective and record related costs. You can add and remove tags using the Amazon SNS Management Console, SDK, CLI or API. You can utilize the AWS Resource Groups Tagging CLI or API to filter and find for topics with particular tags when you have tagged your topics. Besides, you can use the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console to cover utilization and cost information for specific tags in your AWS account bill. Amazon SNS cost allocation tags are accessible in every commercial AWS Regions, and in AWS GovCloud Regions. To know detailed about Amazon SNS cost allocation tags, refer Amazon SNS Tags

Best Practices To Manage Apps On Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is a service provided by AWS and also fully managed by AWS only. It is used for sending notifications to people, machines and devices. You may have configured billing alerts or Cloud watch alarm notifications on AWS accounts. Amazon SNS is responsible for delivery of notifications. This service consists of Topics and subscribers. One topic can have multiple subscribers and when a message publish for a topic then the message will receive by all the subscribers. Before this if we wanted to send certain messages to only a set of subscribers then we need to create separate topic for each set of subscribers.

Some Of The Key Features Of Amazon SNS :

1. It is a method with cost efficiency and easy to push notifications to mobile users, email recipients or even other distributed platforms.
2. Platforms supported for SNS service are with variety such as iOS, Android, Java, Python, PHP, NodeJS from AWS.
3. You can get the delivery status information via AWS CloudWatch on success and failure rates for mobile sent messages as well as their deliveries to SMS, SQS, HTTP, and Lambda destinations.
4. Use SNS as a message bus to send alarms, messages and notifications from AWS services such as CloudWatch, RDS and S3 to other AWS services such as SQS and Lambda.

Best Practices To Manage Apps On Amazon SNS :

• The tokens are responsible for identification of device and particular app on respective device.
• It is good to understand how to manage the applications you write for Amazon SNS. The tokens are managed by AWS on behalf of its clients. When a publisher publishes to a device, it must have the client’s credentials and the device token.
• The tokens are responsible for identification of device and particular app on respective device. Publisher must be able to access the identification, so that publishers can publish the info on device.
• When a user registers his device on Amazon SNS, the token number is recorded which is unique for the user.
• Generated token is combined with some other data and same is used to publish info on the user's device and this token along with the additional data is called as "PlatformEndpoint".

SNS Supports Transport Protocols :

• HTTP, HTTPS – Specify a Subscribers URL as part of the subscription registration; notifications will deliver through an HTTP POST to the specified URL.
• Email-JSON, Email – Messages as email are sent to registered addresses. Email-JSON send notification as a JSON object, as Email sends text-based email.
• SQS – We can specify an SQS queue as endpoint; SNS will enqueue a notification message to the specified queue.
• SMS – Messages are sent to registered phone numbers as SMS text messages.

SNS Supported Endpoint :

• Email Notifications : SNS provide the ability to send Email notifications.
• SMS Notifications : SNS provides the ability to send and receive Short Message Service (SMS) notifications to SMS-enabled mobile phones and smartphones.
• Mobile Push Notifications : SNS provides an ability to send push notification messages directly to the app on mobile devices. Push notification message sent to mobile endpoint can appear in mobile app as message alerts, badge updates, or even sound alert.

Supported Push Notification Services :

• Amazon Device Messaging (ADM)
• Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)
• Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)
• Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) for Windows 8+ and Windows Phone 8.1+
• Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) for Windows Phone 7+
• Baidu Cloud Push for Android devices in China