Retrieving Amazon SES event data from CloudWatch

Amazon SES can publish metrics for your email sending events to Amazon CloudWatch. When you publish event data to CloudWatch, it provides these metrics as an ordered set of time-series data. You can use these metrics to monitor the performance of your email sending. For example, you can monitor the complaint metric and set a CloudWatch alarm to trigger when the metric exceeds a certain value.

There are two levels of granularity at which Amazon SES can publish these events to CloudWatch:

• Across your AWS account – These coarse metrics, which correspond to the metrics you monitor using the Amazon SES console and the GetSendStatistics API, are totals across your entire AWS account. Amazon SES publishes these metrics to CloudWatch automatically.

• Fine-grained – These metrics are categorized by email characteristics that you define using message tags. To publish these metrics to CloudWatch, you have to set up event publishing with a CloudWatch event destination and specify a configuration set when you send an email. You can also specify message tags or use auto-tags that Amazon SES automatically provides.

This section describes the available metrics and how to view the metrics in CloudWatch.

Available Metrics

You can publish following Amazon SES email sending metrics to CloudWatch:

• Send – The send request was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the message to the recipient’s mail server. (If account-level or global suppression is being used, SES will still count it as a send, but delivery is suppressed.)

• RenderingFailure – The email wasn't sent because of a template rendering issue. This event type can occur when template data is missing, or when there is a mismatch between template parameters and data. (This event type only occurs when you send email using the SendTemplatedEmail or SendBulkTemplatedEmail API operations.)

• Reject – Amazon SES accepted the email, but determined that it contained a virus and didn’t attempt to deliver it to the recipient’s mail server.

• Delivery – Amazon SES successfully delivered the email to the recipient's mail server.

• Bounce – A hard bounce that the recipient's mail server permanently rejected the email. (Soft bounces are only included when SES is no longer retrying to deliver the email. Generally these soft bounces indicate a delivery failure, although in some cases a soft bounce can be returned even when the mail reaches the recipient inbox successfully. This typically occurs when the recipient sends an out-of-office automatic reply. Learn more about soft bounces in this AWS re:Post article.)

• Complaint – The email was successfully delivered to the recipient’s mail server, but the recipient marked it as spam.

• DeliveryDelay – The email couldn't be delivered to the recipient’s mail server because a temporary issue occurred. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient's inbox is full, or when the receiving email server experiences a transient issue.

• Subscription – The email was successfully delivered, but the recipient updated the subscription preferences by clicking List-Unsubscribe in the email header or the Unsubscribe link in the footer.

• Open – The recipient received the message and opened it in their email client.

• Click – The recipient clicked one or more links in the email.

Available Dimensions

CloudWatch uses the dimension names that you specify when you add a CloudWatch event destination to a configuration set in Amazon SES. For more information, see Set up a CloudWatch event destination for event publishing.

Viewing Amazon SES Metrics in the CloudWatch Console

The following procedure describes how to view your Amazon SES event publishing metrics using the CloudWatch console.

To view metrics using the CloudWatch console

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. If necessary, change the region. From the navigation bar, select the region where your AWS resources reside. For more information, see Regions and Endpoints.

3. In the navigation pane, choose All Metrics.

4. In the Metrics pane, select SES.

5. Select the metric you want to view. To view fine-grained event publishing metrics, choose the combination of dimensions that you specified when you set up your CloudWatch event destination. To learn more about viewing metrics with CloudWatch, see Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

To view metrics using the AWS CLI

• At a command prompt, use the following command:

  aws cloudwatch list-metrics --namespace "AWS/SES"