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
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:
- A single email or comma-separated list of emails to be passed in and subscribed to the selected notification types.
- Administrative users not included in this list can also choose to subscribe to the
SNS
topics themselves after the template is deployed.
- 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.