CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2amazon-snsamazon-cloudwatch
Adam Duro
Adam Duro

Reputation: 882

CloudWatch SMS notifications for EC2 instances that are not in us-east-1

I am looking to get a notification schema setup for my EC2 instances that are in the us-west-2 data center. I have read the CloudWatch and SNS docs, and I am aware that SMS notifications are only available when setting up SNS Topics in us-east-1.

I am wondering if anyone has found a way to get CloudWatch alarms for instances NOT in us-east-1 to broadcast on a topic setup in us-east-1?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3340

Answers (4)

mister_bun
mister_bun

Reputation: 11

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but I have instances in the us-west-1 region that I needed SMS alerts for, so I found a way to get this to work. The trick is to create both the metrics and the alerts in the us-east-1 region.

On your instance in the us-west-1 region, run the following command to create a metric in the us-east-1 region and and publish a value to it.

aws cloudwatch put-metric-data 
    --region us-east-1 --namespace NameSpace --metric-name MetricName 
    --dimensions InstanceId=i-12345678 --value 10

Next, in the us-east-1 region, create an SNS topic, along with associated SMS subscription(s).

Finally, in the us-east-1 region, the topic you created will be visible. create an alarm based on that metric, specifying the SNS topic you just created.

This alarm will now send SMS notifications via SNS when triggered.

I had thought there might be an additional cost of sending the metric data from us-west-1 to us-east-1, but it turns out that the cost is zero for the number of metrics and frequency I used, which was a single metric sent once per minute.

Upvotes: 1

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 31

If you're trying to create alarms in a region other than your default you must explicitly specify it with the --region option (despite this already being implicit in the ARN).

Upvotes: 1

keba
keba

Reputation: 2127

It appears that the documentation is incorrect - when trying to add a new alarm in us-west-2 that points at a topic in us-east-1 for the SMS capabilities, the following error is observed (tried this today on Sept 10 2014):

A client error (ValidationError) occurred when calling the PutMetricAlarm operation: Invalid region us-east-1 specified. Only us-west-2 is supported.

This is based on running the following command using the aws cli (account number changed to 1234567890):

aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm --alarm-name "ELB UnHealthy > 0" --alarm-description "ELB UnHealthy > 0" --actions-enabled --ok-actions arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:1234567890:EmailOnly --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:1234567890:EmailAndSMS --insufficient-data-actions arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:1234567890:EmailOnly --metric-name UnHealthyHostCount --namespace AWS/ELB --statistic Average --dimensions Name=LoadBalancerName,Value=elb-name --period 60 --evaluation-periods 3 --threshold 1 --comparison-operator GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold

I guess the previous answer was from somebody who didn't actually test this out... It's that or AWS disabled the ability to reference other region sns topics in the last few months and forgot to update their documentation...

Upvotes: 7

tpolyak
tpolyak

Reputation: 1239

You can set up your alarms to send notifications to a different region with the Amazon Cloudwatch CLI. You just have to create the alarm in us-west-2 by calling mon-put-metric-alarm and provide the ARN of your us-east-1 topic as alarm-actions.

export AWS_CLOUDWATCH_URL=http://monitoring.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

mon-put-metric-alarm --alarm-name my-alarm --alarm-description "some desc"
    --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace AWS/EC2 
    --statistic Average  --period 60 --threshold 90 
    --comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold  
    --dimensions InstanceId=i-abcdef --evaluation-periods 3  --unit Percent 
    --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:1234567890:my-topic

You can read the official docs here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/cli/cli-mon-put-metric-alarm.html

And find CLI setup instructions here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/cli/SetupCLI.html

Upvotes: 1

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