A sysops team checks their AWS Personal Health Dashboard every week for upcoming AWS hardware maintenance events. Recently, a team member was on vacation and the team missed an event, which resulted in an outage. The team wants a simple method to ensure that everyone is aware of upcoming events without depending on an individual team member checking the dashboard.
What should be done to address this?
- Build a web scraper to monitor the Personal Health Dashboard. When new health events are detected, send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
- Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event based off the AWS Health service and send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
- Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team to remind the team to view the maintenance events on the Personal Health Dashboard.
- Create an AWS Lambda function that continuously pings all EC2 instances to confirm their health. Alert the team if this check fails.
The AWS Health service publishes Amazon CloudWatch Events [1]. CloudWatch Events can trigger Amazon SNS notifications. This method requires neither additional coding nor infrastructure. It automatically notifies the team of upcoming events, and does not depend upon brittle solutions like web scraping.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/health/latest/ug/cloudwatch-events-health.html