Creating reputation monitoring alarms using CloudWatch - Amazon Simple Email Service

Creating reputation monitoring alarms using CloudWatch

Amazon SES automatically publishes a series of reputation-related metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. You can use these metrics to create alarms that notify you when your bounce or complaint rates reach levels that could impact your account's ability to send email.

Note

The CloudWatch portion of the procedures in this section are intended to just present the core steps for setting up a CloudWatch alarm to monitor your SES sender reputation. They don't explore advanced configurations regarding optional settings for CloudWatch alarms. For complete information about configuring CloudWatch alarms, see Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Prerequisites

  • Create an Amazon SNS topic, and then subscribe to it using your preferred endpoint (such as email or SMS). For more information, see Creating an Amazon SNS topic and Subscribing to an Amazon SNS topic in the Amazon Simple Notification Service Developer Guide.

  • If you've never sent an email in the current Region, you might not see the SES namespace. To ensure that you have metrics, send a test email to the mailbox simulator.

To create a CloudWatch alarm to monitor sending reputation

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/.

  2. In the navigation pane on the left side of the screen, choose Reputation metrics.

  3. On the Reputation metrics page under the Account-level tab, in either the Bounce rate or Complaint rate pane, choose View in CloudWatch - this will open the CloudWatch console with your chosen metric.

  4. Under the Graphed metrics tab, on the line of your chosen metric, for this example, Reputation.BounceRate, choose the alarm bell icon in the Actions column (see image below) - this will open the Specify metric and conditions page.

  5. Scroll down to the Conditions pane, and choose Static in the Threshold type field.

    1. In the Whenever metric is... field, choose Greater/Equal.

    2. In the than... field, specify the value that should cause CloudWatch to raise an alarm.

      • If you're creating an alarm to monitor your bounce rate, note that Amazon SES recommends that you maintain a bounce rate under 5%. If the bounce rate for your account is greater than 10%, we might pause your account's ability to send email. For this reason, you should configure CloudWatch to send you a notification when the bounce rate for your account is greater than or equal to 0.05 (5%).

      • If you're creating an alarm to monitor your complaint rate, note that Amazon SES recommends that you maintain a complaint rate under 0.1%. If the complaint rate for your account is greater than 0.5%, we might pause your account's ability to send email. For this reason, you should configure CloudWatch to send you a notification when the complaint rate for your account is greater than or equal to 0.001 (0.1%).

    3. Expand Additional configuration and choose Treat missing data as ignore (maintain the alarm state) in the Missing data treatment field.

    4. Choose Next.

  6. On the Configure actions pane, choose In Alarm in the Alarm state trigger field.

    1. Choose Select an existing SNS topic in the Select an SNS topic field.

    2. Choose the topic that you created and subscribed to in the prerequisites in the Send a notification to... search box.

    3. Choose Next.

  7. On the Add name and description pane, enter a name and description for the alarm, and then choose Next.

  8. On the Preview and create pane, confirm your settings, and if satisfied, choose Create alarm. If there's something you'd like to change, select the Previous button for each section you'd like to go back to and edit.