Monitoring AWS services using AWS Chatbot

You can use AWS Chatbot to monitor and receive notifications about other AWS services. AWS Chatbot works with a number of AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon GuardDuty. All services that work with AWS Chatbot use Amazon SNS topics as targets to send event and alarm notifications. You may already have established Amazon SNS topics that send notifications to DevOps and development personnel as emails. Because AWS Chatbot redirects those Amazon SNS topics' notifications to chat rooms, you can map those Amazon SNS topics to a Amazon Chime webhook, Microsoft Teams channel, or Slack channel in the AWS Chatbot console.

When you create a new Amazon SNS topic, your services will require additional configuration.

If you want to customize the message content of default service notifications or customize messages for your application events, you can use custom notifications. For more information, see Custom notifications in AWS Chatbot.

You can set up the following AWS services to forward notifications to Amazon Chime, Microsoft Teams, or Slack chat rooms.

AWS Billing and Cost Management

AWS Billing and Cost Management helps AWS account holders plan service usage, service costs, and instance reservations. You do this using several specific types of budgets, which track your unblended costs, subscriptions, refunds, and Reserved Instances. The service sends AWS Budget Alerts to an Amazon SNS topic. You then map the Amazon SNS topic in AWS Chatbot to send those notifications to your chat rooms.

For information about setting up Amazon SNS topics for AWS budgets, see Creating an Amazon SNS Topic for Budget Notifications in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure management service that helps you model and set up Amazon Web Services resources so you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on the applications that you run in AWS. You create a template that describes all of the AWS resources (for example, Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS DB instances) that you want, and AWS CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.

AWS Chatbot supports AWS CloudFormation notifications through Amazon SNS topics. You enable support for SNS topics that are enabled for use with AWS Chatbot by selecting them in each AWS CloudFormation stack configuration. For more information, see Setting AWS CloudFormation Stack Options in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Notifications for AWS developer tools

AWS provides a suite of cloud-based developer tools for creating, managing, and working with software development projects. The AWS development tools suite includes AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation stacks, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, and more. You can redirect Amazon SNS topic subscriptions for these services to AWS Chatbot. For example, if you want notifications about events in an AWS CodeCommit repository or in a pipeline in AWS CodePipeline to appear in a Microsoft Teams or Slack channel for your development teams, you can set up notifications for those resources in the Developer Tools console, and then integrate the SNS topic used for those notifications with AWS Chatbot. For more information, see Configure Integration Between Notifications and AWS Chatbot in the Developer Tools Console User Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch alarms

To monitor performance and operating metrics for AWS services, and send notifications when thresholds are breached, you can create alarms in Amazon CloudWatch. CloudWatch sends an Amazon SNS notification or performs an action when the alarm changes state.

CloudWatch also features composite alarms. Composite alarms allow you to combine multiple alarms to reduce alarm noise and focus on critical operational issues. You can easily combine multiple alarms together into alarm hierarchies that only trigger once, when multiple alarms fire at the same time. Composite alarms are currently supported by AWS Chatbot.

Any metric, for any AWS service, that CloudWatch alarm actions can report can also be shared by an SNS topic to chat rooms through AWS Chatbot. This includes alarms for services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

For information about setting up SNS topics to forward CloudWatch alarms, see Set Up Amazon SNS Notifications in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Because CloudWatch alarms use SNS topics to forward alarm notifications, you need to map only the associated Amazon SNS topic to your Slack channel or Amazon Chime webhook configuration in AWS Chatbot.

AWS Chatbot also supports several AWS services through CloudWatch Events. For more information, see the following section.

Amazon EventBridge

AWS Chatbot supports multiple AWS services through Amazon EventBridge rules. EventBridge uses rules to help manage AWS service events and how you respond to them. You can use these rules to associate an Amazon SNS topic (or other actions) with an event type from any AWS service.

You map the Amazon SNS topic to the EventBridge rule, and then map it to a chat channel or Amazon Chime webhook in the AWS Chatbot console. When a service event matches the rule, the rule's target Amazon SNS topic sends an event to the AWS Chatbot for processing. The AWS Chatbot then sends a notification to the chat room. You can also customize the content of your notifications by using the custom notifications event schema and EventBridge InputTransformers. For more information, see Custom notifications in AWS Chatbot and Creating an EventBridge Rule that sends notifications to AWS Chatbot.

AWS Chatbot can process most AWS service events handled by EventBridge. This includes AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Health, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Systems Manager. AWS Chatbot only supports EventBridge events from AWS services. For an exhaustive list of supported service events, see EventBridge Event Examples from Supported AWS Services in the EventBridge User Guide.

AWS Config

AWS Config performs resource oversight and tracking for auditing and compliance, config change management, troubleshooting, and security analysis. It provides a detailed view of AWS resources configuration in your AWS account. The service also shows how resources relate to one another and how they were configured in the past, so you can see how configurations and relationships change over time.

For AWS Config monitoring, you configure Amazon CloudWatch Events rules to forward AWS Config events notifications to an Amazon SNS topic. You can then map that topic to AWS Chatbot to track those event notifications in chat rooms.

For more information, see Notifications for AWS Config in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a security threat monitoring service that detects and reports on potential security threats in your AWS account. It uses threat intelligence feeds, such as lists of malicious IPs and domains, and machine learning to identify possible unauthorized and malicious activity in your AWS environment.

GuardDuty reports its security incidents and threats through findings. Findings appear in the GuardDuty console and automatically appear as CloudWatch Events. You then create Amazon CloudWatch Events rules, so these events appear as notifications to a selected SNS topic. You then map that SNS topic to a chat channel or Amazon Chime webhook in AWS Chatbot.

For more information, see Monitoring Amazon GuardDuty Findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events in the Amazon GuardDuty User Guide.

AWS Health

AWS Health provides visibility into the state of your AWS resources, services, and accounts. It provides information about the performance and availability of resources that affect your applications running on AWS and guidance for remediation. AWS Health provides this information in a console called the AWS Health Dashboard.

AWS Health directly supports EventBridge notifications. You configure CloudWatch Events rules for AWS Health, and specify an SNS topic mapped in AWS Chatbot.

For more information, see Monitoring AWS Health Events with Amazon CloudWatch Events in the AWS Health User Guide.

AWS Security Hub

AWS Security Hub provides a comprehensive view of high-priority security alerts and compliance status across your AWS accounts. Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security findings from multiple AWS services, including Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie. Security Hub reduces the effort of collecting and prioritizing security findings across accounts, from AWS services, and from AWS partner tools.

Security Hub supports two types of integration with CloudWatch Events rules, both of which AWS Chatbot supports:

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager lets you view and control your infrastructure on AWS. Using the Systems Manager console, you can view operational data from multiple AWS services and automate operational tasks across your AWS resources. Systems Manager helps you maintain security and compliance by scanning your managed instances, and reporting or taking corrective action on detected policy violations.

AWS Chatbot supports the following Systems Manager events.

Configuration compliance

Automation

Run command

State manager

Parameter store

For information about monitoring Systems Manager events with CloudWatch, see Monitoring Systems Manager Events with Amazon CloudWatch Events in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

AWS Systems Manager Runbooks

SM runbooks define the actions that Systems Manager performs on your managed instances and other AWS resources when an automation runs. A runbook contains one or more steps that run in sequential order. The process of running these actions and their steps is called the automation. AWS Chatbot supports the ability to run SM runbooks directly from Microsoft Teams or Slack using CLI commands. You can type a command to list your runbooks and choose a runbook to run. Runbooks can require one or more input parameters before running (for example, Amazon EC2 instances can require inputs such as instance id). Once the runbook begins, it runs in its entirety. For an example of running a runbook using a CLI command, see Run an Automation runbook.

For more information about SM runbooks, see Working with runbooks in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager

AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager is an incident management console designed to help users mitigate and recover from incidents affecting their AWS-hosted applications. An incident is any unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of services.

AWS Chatbot allows you to communicate through chat channels and receive notifications and incident updates during an incident. You can also interact with the incident directly using chat commands. For more information, see Chat channels in the Incident Manager User Guide.