Simplify Control Tower administrative notifications

2 minute read
Content level: Intermediate
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This article explains how to use the Control Tower notification center sample solution to simplify administrative alert creation.

Background

Administrative users managing a Control Tower organization often want to see alerts when important events happen. Control Tower provides default SNS topics that users can subscribe to, but they're often "too noisy" for what users are looking for. The user then has to set up filtering on the default notifications, or manually create their own custom ones.

Control Tower notification center sample solution

The Control Tower notification center sample solution allows administrative users to easily subscribe to specific alert types by selecting them from a parameterized CloudFormation template. This allows the administrators to pick and choose which alerts they want to see, without the need for setting up custom filtering on a "noisy" SNS topic.

You can find the CloudFormation template and implementation details for this solution in our GitHub repository: Control Tower Notification Center Repository.

Usage

Screenshot of parameters that can be set when deploying the CloudFormation template

Figure 1: CloudFormation template parameters for selecting notifications

 

As seen above, the notifications that are relevant to you (and your team) can be chosen from a list of parameters when deploying the CloudFormation template. The template allows for:

  1. A single email or comma-separated list of emails to be passed in and subscribed to the selected notification types.
  2. Administrative users not included in this list can also choose to subscribe to the SNS topics themselves after the template is deployed.
  3. The SNS topics for each notification type will be created, even if the user does not subscribe to that notification during deployment of the template.

This flexibility allows users to decide which way they'd like to manage their subscriptions (via template parameters or by separately subscribing to the topic).

Conclusion

The Control Tower notification center sample solution can be deployed as-is, or customized to add additional notifications relevant to your organization.