AWS Health notifications, explained

AWS Health (the AWS Health Dashboard) reports the events and the scheduled work that affect the resources in your own account, separately from the overall state of AWS. The common ones: an EC2 instance retired because the hardware hosting it is degrading, scheduled maintenance on EC2 or RDS, an incident in a region you use, and notice that a certificate or an API is going away.

All of it shows up in the AWS Health Dashboard and, at the same time, lands in the account's contact mailbox. The sender is no-reply-aws@amazon.com, and the subject usually carries the account ID.

In a Health mail, the part that matters — by when, what to do, and what happens if you do not — sits halfway down the body. In a retirement notice, for instance, the text goes on to say that after the deadline the instance will be stopped, that with an EBS root volume a stop and a start move it to a different host, and that the public IP may change. Skim past that and you find out on the morning of the deadline, when the instance has already stopped.

Holding several customers' accounts adds the work of turning the account ID in the subject into a customer. The same mail arrives once per customer, so checking every time whose is whose is not realistic.

Sabaki works on the Health notifications that arrive by mail. Forward them to that customer's forwarding address and it checks the DKIM signature to confirm they came from AWS, pulls the account ID and the instance ID out of the body to file them under the customer, explains what is going to happen, what it affects and what to do, and extracts the deadline. There is nothing to configure in the AWS Health API or in EventBridge; Sabaki does not integrate with either of them directly today.

The explanation spells out the options you have, so it doubles as the draft of the message you send your customer. Put Slack on the other end and the summary, the deadline and the explanation are posted to that customer's channel, so whoever is on it reads before moving. What was done stays in the response ledger, and a notification still not handled past its deadline is obvious at a glance in the inbox.

Some Health events never arrive by mail, so there is no reason to stop checking the Dashboard. What Sabaki takes off you is the rest of it: reading the mail that does arrive, working out whose it is and what it is about, explaining it, and keeping a record of what was done.