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shiichan

CloudWatch Alarm Notifications Now Carry Tags: Goodbye, Extra ListTagsForResource Calls!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#devops#infrastructure

Hi, it's Shiichan!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

Today I found an update to Amazon CloudWatch alarms that I think a lot of you running operations will love, so let's go through it together!

What was announced?

AWS announced in What's New that Amazon CloudWatch Alarms can now include alarm tags in action payloads.

When you enable it on an alarm, CloudWatch adds the alarm's tags to the message it sends every time the alarm changes state. The destinations are:

  • Amazon SNS
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon EventBridge

The story so far

If you send many alarms through one shared notification pipeline, the receiver usually wants to know who owns the alarm and which environment it belongs to.

Until now the tags weren't in the notification. A team routing hundreds of alarms through a single SNS topic to a Lambda function had to call ListTagsForResource for each event to find the owning team before paging anyone.

What changes

The tags now arrive inside the notification itself, so there's no need to look them up afterwards!

  • A Lambda function can route straight from the message to the owning team
  • With EventBridge, you can match and filter events by tag
  • Owner, environment, and service are visible right from the notification

I think this is especially nice for ops teams handling lots of alarms through a shared notification setup!

Dive Deep

Here's what the source says about the settings.

  • It's configured per alarm, and it's off by default
  • You can choose which tags to include in three ways
    • All tags
    • Only selected tag keys
    • All tags except selected keys
  • Supported alarm types are metric alarms, composite alarms, and log alarms

It's available in all AWS Regions where CloudWatch is available, except Middle East (UAE) and Middle East (Bahrain).

For setup details, see "Alarm tags in action payloads" in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Wrap-up

  • CloudWatch alarm notifications to SNS, Lambda, and EventBridge can now include the alarm's tags
  • Configurable per alarm, off by default
  • Choose all tags, selected keys only, or everything except selected keys
  • Works with metric, composite, and log alarms
  • Available in CloudWatch Regions except Middle East (UAE) and Middle East (Bahrain)

This one is for SRE and platform teams who run lots of alarms through a shared notification pipeline!

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