Monitoring your Amazon SES sending activity - Amazon Simple Email Service

Monitoring your Amazon SES sending activity

Amazon SES provides methods to monitor your sending activity using events, metrics, and statistics. An event is something that happens related to your sending activity that you’ve specified to be tracked as a metric. A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points representing the values of a monitored event type producing statistics. Statistics are metric data aggregations for a specified period of time including up to the present.

These monitoring methods assist you in keeping track of important measures, such as your account's bounce, complaint and reject rates. Excessively high bounce and complaint rates may jeopardize your ability to send emails using SES. These methods can also be used to measure the rates at which your customers engage with the emails you send by helping you to identify your overall open and click through rates utilizing event publishing and custom domains associated with configuration sets - see Configuring custom domains to handle open and click tracking.

The first step in setting up monitoring is to identify the types of email events related to your sending activity that you want to measure and monitor using SES. You can choose the following event types to monitor in SES:

  • Send – The send request was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the message to the recipient’s mail server. (If account-level or global suppression is being used, SES will still count it as a send, but delivery is suppressed.)

  • RenderingFailure – The email wasn't sent because of a template rendering issue. This event type can occur when template data is missing, or when there is a mismatch between template parameters and data. (This event type only occurs when you send email using the SendTemplatedEmail or SendBulkTemplatedEmail API operations.)

  • Reject – Amazon SES accepted the email, but determined that it contained a virus and didn’t attempt to deliver it to the recipient’s mail server.

  • Delivery – Amazon SES successfully delivered the email to the recipient's mail server.

  • Bounce – A hard bounce that the recipient's mail server permanently rejected the email. (Soft bounces are only included when SES is no longer retrying to deliver the email. Generally these soft bounces indicate a delivery failure, although in some cases a soft bounce can be returned even when the mail reaches the recipient inbox successfully. This typically occurs when the recipient sends an out-of-office automatic reply. Learn more about soft bounces in this AWS re:Post article.)

  • Complaint – The email was successfully delivered to the recipient’s mail server, but the recipient marked it as spam.

  • DeliveryDelay – The email couldn't be delivered to the recipient’s mail server because a temporary issue occurred. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient's inbox is full, or when the receiving email server experiences a transient issue.

  • Subscription – The email was successfully delivered, but the recipient updated the subscription preferences by clicking List-Unsubscribe in the email header or the Unsubscribe link in the footer.

  • Open – The recipient received the message and opened it in their email client.

  • Click – The recipient clicked one or more links in the email.

You can monitor email sending events in several ways. The method you choose depends on the type of event you want to monitor, the granularity and level of detail you want to monitor it with, and the location where you want SES to publish the data. You're required to use either feedback notifications or event publishing to track bounce and complaint events. You can also choose to use multiple monitoring methods. The characteristics of each method are listed in the following table.

Monitoring Method Events You Can Monitor How to Access the Data Level of Detail Granularity

SES console

Account health, emails sent, quota used, successful send requests, rejects, bounces & complaints (recent history to current reputation)

Account dashboard page in the SES console

Count and percentage

Across entire AWS account

SES console

Account health, emails sent, bounces & complaints (current reputation)

Reputation metrics page in the SES console

Calculated rates only

Across entire AWS account

Virtual Deliverability Manager

Accounts statistics, ISP, sending identities, configuration sets, sent, delivered, complaints, transient & permanent bounces, opens & clicks, deliverability and reputation.

Virtual Deliverability Manager dashboard in the SES console

Virtual Deliverability Manager advisor in the SES console

Count and percentage

Across entire AWS account

SES API

Deliveries, bounces, complaints, and rejects

GetSendStatistics API operation

Count only

Across entire AWS account

Amazon CloudWatch console

Sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, bounce rate, complaints, complaint rate, rejects, rendering failures, and blacklisted IPs.

CloudWatch console

Note

Some metrics don't appear in CloudWatch until the associated event occurs. For example, bounce metrics don't appear in CloudWatch until at least one email that you send bounces, or until you generate a simulated bounce event by using the mailbox simulator.

Count only

Across entire AWS account

Feedback notifications

Deliveries, bounces, and complaints

Amazon SNS notification (deliveries, bounces, and complaints) or email (bounces and complaints only). See Setting up event notifications.

Details on each event

Across entire AWS account

Event publishing

Sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, rejects, and rendering failures.

Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Data Firehose, or by Amazon SNS notification—see Monitor email sending using event publishing.

(Additional charges apply, see Price per metric for CloudWatch.)

Details on each event

Fine-grained (based on user-definable email characteristics)

Event publishing utilizing custom domains associated with configuration sets - more info

Open and click tracking.

Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Data Firehose, or by Amazon SNS notification.

(Additional charges apply, see Price per metric for CloudWatch.)

Details on each event.

Fine-grained (based on user-definable email characteristics)
Note

The metrics measured by email sending events may not align perfectly with your sending quotas. This discrepancy can be caused by email bounces and rejections, or by using the SES inbox simulator. To find out how close you are to your sending quotas, see Monitoring your sending quotas.

For information on how to use each monitoring method, see the following topics: