How To Setup Amazon Lightsail Alarms Notifications

In this video we walkthrough setting up Lightsail Alarm Notifications. This is a feature that should notify you by SMS or Email when your instances are experiencing spikes in usage. I would recommend using an external monitoring service in addition to this service as I don’t believe it covers all outage scenarios currently. But it is available, and  let’s see how to set it up.

Steps

• Sign in to the Lightsail console.
• On the Lightsail home page, choose Account on the top navigation menu.
• Choose Account in the drop-down menu.
• Choose Add email address or Add SMS number in the Notification contacts section on the Profile & contacts tab.
• Complete one of the following steps:
• If you are adding an email address, choose the AWS Region where you want to add the notification contact. Enter your email address into the text box. Add email address for each Region where you have AWS lightsail resources.
• If you are adding an SMS number, choose the AWS Region where you want to add the notification contact. Choose the country of your mobile number, and enter it into the text box. The country code is already entered for you.
  Note
  SMS text messaging is not supported in all AWS Regions in which you can create Lightsail resources, and text messages cannot be sent to some countries and regions of the world. For more information, see SMS text messaging support.
• Choose Add contact.
  When you add an email address as a notification contact, a verification request is sent to that address. The verification request email contains a link that the recipient must click to confirm that they want to receive Lightsail notifications. SMS messaging does not require verification.
• Choose I understand.
  Your email address or mobile phone number is added to the Notification contacts section. Email addresses are not verified until you complete the verification process in the following steps. Notifications are not sent to the email address until after you verify it. Choose Resend next to one of your regional email addresses to send another verification request if the verification request got lost, or was deleted.
  Note
  SMS messaging does not require verification. Therefore, you don’t need to complete steps 8 through 10 in this procedure after you add an SMS notification contact.
• Open the inbox for the email address that you added as a notification contact in Lightsail.
• Open the AWS Notification – Subscription Confirmation email from no-reply@sns.amazonaws.com.
  Note
  Check the mailbox’s spam and junk folders if the verification request is not in the inbox folder.
• Choose Confirm subscription in the email to confirm that you want to receive Lightsail notifications.
  A browser window opens to the following page confirming your subscription. To unsubscribe, choose click here to unsubscribe on the page. Or, if you have closed the page, complete the steps to delete your notification contacts.

Creating instance metric alarms using the Lightsail console

Complete the following steps to create an instance metric alarm using the Lightsail console.

1. Sign in to the Lightsail console.
2. On the Lightsail home page, choose the Instances tab.
3. Choose the name of the instance for which you want to create alarms.
4. Choose the Metrics tab on the instance management page.
5. Choose the metric ‘Status Check Failures’ in the drop-down menu under the Metrics Graphs.
6. Choose Add alarm in the Alarms section of the page.
7. Choose a comparison operator value in the drop-down menu. Example values are greater than or equal to, greater than, less than, or less than or equal to.
8. Enter a threshold for the alarm for 2 failures.
9. Enter the data points to alarm.
10. Choose the evaluation periods. The period can be specified in 5-minute increments, from 5 minutes up to 24 hours.
11. Choose one of the following notification methods:
    1. Email — You are notified by email when the alarm state changes to ALARM.
    2. SMS text message — You are notified by SMS text message when the alarm state changes to ALARM. SMS messaging is not supported in all AWS Regions in which you can create Lightsail resources, and SMS text messages cannot be sent to all countries/regions. For more information, see SMS text messaging support.