Managing notifications from several AWS accounts, customer by customer

An AWS notification carries a 12-digit account ID in the subject or the body, and little else: the customer's name appears nowhere. With 5 customers and 15 accounts in your care, the same maintenance notice arrives 15 times, and each copy has to be checked against a spreadsheet to work out whose production it is and which one is a staging environment.

The record of what was done is shut inside the mailbox of whoever dealt with it, so “did anyone handle that notice for Company B?” has no answer within the team, and what little there was disappears when that person changes team or leaves.

In Sabaki the customer is created as a group first, and that customer's AWS account IDs are registered in it. Each group is issued a forwarding address of its own, so if you already keep a mailbox per customer, forwarding from there is all the sorting there is to do.

And if the notifications for several customers land in one mailbox, that works too: the account ID pulled out of the body is matched against the accounts already registered, and the notice goes to the right customer. An account ID seen for the first time appears at the top of the inbox as an “unconfirmed AWS account”; press “Link”, pick the customer, and from then on it is recognised on its own.

The inbox filters by customer, and starred notifications, the archive, the trash, search and bulk actions are the same for everyone in the workspace. The response ledger keeps who decided “Handled” or “No action needed”, when, and with what reason. Slack and email destinations are split per customer too, so Company A's notifications reach only Company A's channel.

Notifications are sorted by account ID, so Organizations member accounts are registered one by one under their customer. For cost visibility, connecting the management (payer) account shows the total spend of each member account, and the per-service breakdown for a member account is part of the Pro plan.

Groups and sorting notifications by customer are on every plan. AWS account connections are 1 on Free and unlimited from Team up; sharing with your team is 3 people on Team, 10 on Business and unlimited on Pro; and splitting Slack and email per customer, together with the client share view, start at Business.