To configure Grafana Alerts with Amazon SNS, follow the steps below.

1. Create an SNS Topic

  • Go to the AWS SNS Dashboard.
  • Click Create topic.
  • Choose the Standard topic type and enter a name for the topic.
  • After the topic is created, click Create subscription.
  • Select a protocol (e.g., Email or SMS) and provide the corresponding endpoint (email address or phone number).
  • Confirm the subscription through the email/SMS sent by AWS.

2. Set Up AWS Credentials in Grafana

  • In the AWS IAM Console, create an IAM user with a custom policy that grants sns:Publish permissions to your SNS topic.
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "sns:Publish",
            "Resource": "<SNS-TOPIC-ARN>"
        }
    ]
}
  • After creating the user, download the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.

In Grafana:

  • Go to Configuration → Data Sources.
  • Add a CloudWatch data source. Data Source
  • Enter the Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and AWS Region. Data Source 2
  • At the bottom of the page, click on Save & test, you should see a displayed message saying 1. Successfully queried the CloudWatch metrics API. 2. Successfully queried the CloudWatch logs API.

3. Configure Grafana Contact point

  • Go to contact points under Alerting then click on Add contact point.
  • Enter a name for your contact point.
  • Choose AWS SNS in Integration menu.
  • In The Amazon SNS API URL, enter this : https://sns.{SNS-TOPIC-REGION}.amazonaws.com
  • In the SNS Topic ARN, enter the ARN of the SNS topic that you created in step 1.
  • Click Save contact point
  • You can test the integration by clicking on Test on the top right of the screen
  • You should receive an email/SMS on the email/number subscribed to the SNS topic.

4. Configure Your alert

  • Go to Alert rules under Alerting then click on New alert rule.
  • Give your alert rule a name.
  • under Define query and alert condition select the Data source entered in step 2.
  • You can select CloudWatch Metrics or CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch
  • Select what metrics or log group you want to query on.
  • In section B select a reduce option to get a single number out of your query A
  • In section C you can select your threshold, this will be the trigger for your alert.
  • Comment : if you want to use logs, you will need to adapt your query to filter in a data series format.
  • Example
fields @message, application
| fields strcontains(@message, 'error') as is_error, application
| stats sum(is_error) as error_count, application by bin(2m) as time_of_error, application
| sort time_of_error desc
  • This is a query that will look up for any log that contains the word error and turn the result into data series. Query
  • Scroll down, Create a new folder and select it.
  • You will need to create an evaluation group in order to define how often the alert rule is evaluated, you can choose values from 10s to 1h.
  • Pending period is how long the threshold configured in section C needs to be met to trigger the alert rule.
  • Last mandatory entry will be the contact point that will be used to send the notifications, you can find the contact point created in Step 3 in the menu.
  • Click Save rule and exit on top right
  • You will start receiving notifications (email/SMS) whenever your alert rule conditions are met.