AWS User Notifications FAQs

What is AWS User Notifications?
AWS User Notifications enables users to centrally setup and view notifications from AWS services, such as AWS Health events, Amazon CloudWatch alarms, or EC2 Instance state change, in a consistent, human-friendly format. Users can view notifications across accounts, regions, and services in a Console Notifications Center, and configure delivery channels, like email, chat, and mobile push notifications, where they can receive these notifications.

Why should I use AWS User Notifications?
AWS User Notifications provides users with a single place in the console to setup and view relevant AWS notifications across accounts, regions, and services. The Notification Center lets users filter notifications in their accounts by service, displays a detailed notification view with human-readable message and delivery state, and provides deep-links to the relevant console resource pages. AWS User Notifications lets users aggregate multiple events into a single notification for an easy top-level account view.

How does this service relate to/work with other AWS services?
AWS User Notifications allows users to view and configure notifications across AWS services in a Notifications Center in the console. Notifications link to relevant service consoles to view current resource status and take action.

What types of notifications does AWS User Notifications support?
AWS User Notifications allows users to select any EventBridge events, like CloudWatch Alarm state change, and configure them to generate notifications. Currently, more than 100 AWS services emit events to EventBridge.

How will AWS User Notifications permissions work?
Users can set up an IAM policy that defines who (users, groups and roles) can perform which actions on AWS User Notifications resources. The policy uses resource-level permissions to determine which resources users of the IAM policy can work with. The policy also defines how they can work with them.
When creating an IAM policy, users refer to the notification-configuration, event-rules, and channel resources by their Amazon Resource Name (ARN).

How do I configure notifications?
To enable notifications, users can go to the ‘Notifications Center’ from the bell icon on the Console header, navigate to the ‘Notifications Configurations’ page, and create configurations to determine which events they want to be notified about, how often we should notify them (immediately, within 10 mins, or within 12 hours), and in which channels; e.g., send email to abc@example.com within 10 minutes whenever EC2 instance ID 123456 state changed to 'stopped'.

Which channels will be supported at launch?
Configured notifications will be available to the user in the Console Notifications Center by default. In addition, as part of the notification configuration users will have the option to subscribe to email, chat, and mobile push notifications, as additional channels to receive specific notifications.

Will I be able to customize my notifications? i.e. make changes to a notification title or body.

The service does not support customization features at this time.

Does AWS User Notifications allow users to get notifications across multiple accounts?

Yes. AWS User Notifications will allow users to get notifications across multiple accounts through Amazon Event Bridge integration. Users will need to configure EventBridge to send and receive events between AWS accounts, and specify which AWS accounts can send events to or receive events from the event bus in the user’s account. The user will then use the receiver account to generate notifications across accounts. To learn more, see Sending and receiving Amazon EventBridge events between AWS accounts. 

Does AWS User Notifications provide users with APIs to access notifications?

No, AWS User Notifications does not provide programmatic access to notifications.

I’m currently using AWS User Notifications to receive notifications, do I still need to use other service consoles and/or programmatically integrate with other services (e.g., Health APIs)?

Yes, to access full service capabilities, view up-to-date service information, or take actions, customers should visit the service consoles or directly integrate with APIs/SDKs. See respective AWS service documentation for recommendations and best practices for your individual use cases.

Can I take an action from a notification?

No. Notifications will include links to the relevant service console pages in order to perform actions.