AWS SNS

As part of its AWS suite, Amazon provides a notification broker service called ‘Simple Notification Service’ (SNS). Amazon SNS works similarly to Netdata’s own notification system, allowing to dispatch a single notification to multiple subscribers of different types. Among other things, SNS supports sending notifications to:

• Email addresses
• Mobile Phones via SMS
• HTTP or HTTPS web hooks
• AWS Lambda functions
• AWS SQS queues
• Mobile applications via push notifications You can send notifications through Amazon SNS using Netdata’s Agent alert notification feature, which supports dozens of endpoints, user roles, and more.

Limitations

• While Amazon SNS supports sending differently formatted messages for different delivery methods, Netdata does not currently support this functionality.
• For email notification support, we recommend using Netdata’s email notifications, as it has the following benefits:
  • In most cases, it requires less configuration.
  • Netdata’s emails are nicely pre-formatted and support features like threading, which requires a lot of manual effort in SNS.
  • It is less resource intensive and more cost-efficient than SNS.

Setup

Prerequisites

• The Amazon Web Services CLI tools (awscli).
• An actual home directory for the user you run Netdata as, instead of just using / as a home directory. The setup depends on the distribution, but /var/lib/netdata is the recommended directory. If you are using Netdata as a dedicated user, the permissions will already be correct.
• An Amazon SNS topic to send notifications to with one or more subscribers. The Getting Started section of the Amazon SNS documentation covers the basics of how to set this up. Make note of the Topic ARN when you create the topic.
• While not mandatory, it is highly recommended to create a dedicated IAM user on your account for Netdata to send notifications. This user needs to have programmatic access, and should only allow access to SNS. For an additional layer of security, you can create one for each system or group of systems.
• Terminal access to the Agent you wish to configure.

Configuration

Options

The following options can be defined for this notification

AWSSNS_MESSAGE_FORMAT

For the complete list of supported notification variables, see the Alert Notification Variables section in the Health Reference.

DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_AWSSNS

All roles will default to this variable if left unconfigured.

You can have different recipient Topics per role, by editing DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_AWSSNS with the Topic ARN you want, in the following entries at the bottom of the same file:

role_recipients_awssns[sysadmin]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Systems"
role_recipients_awssns[domainadmin]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Domains"
role_recipients_awssns[dba]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Databases"
role_recipients_awssns[webmaster]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Development"
role_recipients_awssns[proxyadmin]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Proxy"
role_recipients_awssns[sitemgr]="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:Sites"

via File

The configuration file name for this integration is health_alarm_notify.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config health_alarm_notify.conf

Examples

Basic Configuration

An example working configuration would be:

```text
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Amazon SNS notifications

SEND_AWSSNS="YES"
AWSSNS_MESSAGE_FORMAT="${status} on ${host} at ${date}: ${chart} ${value_string}"
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_AWSSNS="arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:123456789012:MyTopic"

Troubleshooting

Test Notification

You can run the following command by hand, to test alerts configuration:

# become user netdata
sudo su -s /bin/bash netdata

# enable debugging info on the console
export NETDATA_ALARM_NOTIFY_DEBUG=1

# send test alarms to sysadmin
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test

# send test alarms to any role
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test "ROLE"

Note that this will test all alert mechanisms for the selected role.