

# Retrieving Amazon SES event data from CloudWatch
<a name="event-publishing-retrieving-cloudwatch"></a>

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](monitor-sending-using-event-publishing-setup.md) with a CloudWatch event destination and [specify a configuration set](event-publishing-send-email.md) when you send an email. You can also specify message tags or use [auto-tags](monitor-using-event-publishing.md#event-publishing-how-works) that Amazon SES automatically provides.

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

## Available Metrics
<a name="event-publishing-retrieving-cloudwatch-metrics"></a>

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 [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendTemplatedEmail.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendTemplatedEmail.html) or [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendBulkTemplatedEmail.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendBulkTemplatedEmail.html) 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](https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ses-understand-soft-bounces).)
+ **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
<a name="event-publishing-retrieving-cloudwatch-dimensions"></a>

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](event-publishing-add-event-destination-cloudwatch.md).

## Viewing Amazon SES Metrics in the CloudWatch Console
<a name="event-publishing-retrieving-cloudwatch-console"></a>

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/](https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/).

1. If necessary, change the region. From the navigation bar, select the region where your AWS resources reside. For more information, see [Regions and Endpoints](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html).

1. In the navigation pane, choose **All Metrics**.

1. In the **Metrics** pane, select **SES**.

1. Select the metric you want to view. To view fine-grained [event publishing metrics](monitor-using-event-publishing.md), choose the combination of dimensions that you specified when you [set up your CloudWatch event destination](event-publishing-add-event-destination-cloudwatch.md). To learn more about viewing metrics with CloudWatch, see [Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html).

**To view metrics using the AWS CLI**
+ At a command prompt, use the following command:

  ```
  1. aws cloudwatch list-metrics --namespace "AWS/SES"
  ```