Communications between you and AMS occur for many reasons:
An RFC created by AMS that requires your approval
An AMS case created to investigate an RFC you created that has failed
Events created by monitoring alerts
Patching service notifications that inform you of upcoming patching
Service requests and incident reports
Monthly CRM reports
Occasional important AWS announcements (your CSDM contacts you if any action on your part is required)
All of these notifications are sent to the default contact information (the root account email) that you provided AMS when you were onboarded. Because it's difficult to keep individual emails updated, we recommend that you use a group email that can be updated on your end. All notifications sent to you are also received by AMS operations and analyzed before making a response.
AMS notification service provides two additional ways to set up contacts for notifications:
Tag your resources with contact tags (the tag Key Value being contact information) and provide the tag Key Name to your CSDM. Alarms on those resources will be sent to the contacts provided in the Key Value, in addition to the account contact created at onboarding. This is especially useful for application owners. For more information, see Tag-based alert notification.
(Required at onboarding) Send to your CSDM named lists of contacts for non-resource based notifications. For example, you might have a list named "SecurityContacts" and another named "OperationsContacts", and so forth. AMS adds the list to the notification service, and alarms that apply to that list's context are sent to those contacts. This is especially useful for organizational matters.
This advanced alert routing feature is active for most of the essential CloudWatch alarms such as Amazon EC2 instance failure, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume capacity utilization - Root usage, Amazon EBS NonRoot usage, High Memory utilization, High Swap usage, and High CPU utilization for Amazon EC2.
Additionally, when you file a service request, or incident report, you have the option of adding "CC Emails" (highly recommended) and those email addresses receive notifications about the service request or incident.
Important
While the CC email addresses provided in service requests and incident reports receive email notifications of communications, other notifications, such as patching notifications, appear in your Service Request list (an email is also sent to the default contact), without explicit notification to you that you have a communication awaiting your attention. This is why we strongly recommend adding a CC email where you can, and setting up the default contact email as a group to which everyone using AMS is a member.
Additionally, you can request special notifications for new AMIs, for RFC state change, and for configuration changes in your AMS account. These optional notification services are discussed next.
