AWS notifications and costs, sorted

“What is this English notice?” “Which customer's account is it about?” “Does it need action?” — the questions anyone holding several AWS accounts runs into every week, gathered by problem. Each guide shows a real notification as it arrives and the summary Sabaki puts on it.

• How to make AWS notification emails readable

  How to turn the dense AWS notification emails you receive into a plain summary and explanation, just by forwarding them. What is happening, what it affects, what to do and by when: all of it delivered to an inbox and to Slack by forwarding the mail to a dedicated address.

• AWS Health notifications, explained

  How to read the instance retirement warnings and maintenance notices AWS Health sends by mail: an explanation, the deadline pulled out, and which customer and which account each one is about.

• Reading ACM certificate renewal notices

  What the AWS Certificate Manager mails that announce a renewal or ask you to validate one actually mean, and how to spot the ones that need action. With an example of the summary and the severity Sabaki puts on them.

• Reading RDS maintenance notices

  How to read an Amazon RDS Maintenance Notification: the maintenance window, whether it restarts anything, and the deadline — and how to carry it through to warning your customer in advance.

• Reading Lambda runtime deprecation notices

  How to make sense of a Lambda runtime deprecation notice like “AWS Lambda end of support for Node.js 18”, and how to get the affected functions, the accounts and the deadline into shape to act on.

• AWS notifications in Slack, explained

  How to post AWS notification emails to Slack automatically, each with a summary you can read, a severity and a deadline. A channel per customer and no marketing mail, set up with a forwarding rule and a webhook.

• Managing notifications from several AWS accounts, customer by customer

  How an MSP or a dev shop sorts the notifications from several AWS accounts by the customer they belong to. Automatic account-ID matching, an inbox and destinations per customer, and a record of what was done.

• AWS cost visibility and savings recommendations

  How to see AWS costs with nothing but a read-only role, detect idle EC2 and RDS instances, unattached EBS volumes and unused Elastic IPs, and get savings recommendations with a monthly estimate on each. What the Free plan covers, and how Pro's right-sizing, Reserved Instance and Savings Plans recommendations differ.

• How to find unused AWS resources

  How to find unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs and idle EC2 and RDS instances with the AWS CLI and CloudWatch, and what to check before deleting them. Plus how to keep doing it across every region and every account.

• AWS User Notifications and Sabaki: what is different

  AWS User Notifications is AWS's own feature for delivering and centralising the notifications of one account or one organization; Sabaki takes the notification emails that arrive, sorts them across several customers, explains them and records how they were handled. A table compares the unit of management, the language, immediacy and price, and how the two divide the work when used together.

• AWS Cost Explorer and Sabaki: the differences

  Sabaki is not a replacement for AWS Cost Explorer: it uses its data to put several customers' accounts on one screen, find the resources that were left behind in actual figures, and explain them. What each one does, what it does not, and what it costs, in a comparison table.

• First-time setup: what to do after you sign up

  What to do, in order, after signing up for Sabaki: issue the forwarding address, set forwarding up in your mailbox, check the first notification, work through the inbox, deliver to Slack and email, invite your team, and connect costs.