Three key metrics for monitoring AWS SNS performance and usage.
Well if you have already read our blog on important ELB metrics to monitor, you will know that, along with ELB another AWS service Simple Notification Service (SNS) was also added to our monitoring capabilities. This post will talk about the importance of your SNS environment and metrics you should consider monitoring.
Communication is necessary to maintain operational efficiency in your AWS cloud infrastructure. Your application's ability to interact with and transmit data to other aspects of AWS and users makes your job much simpler. This capability is provided by the AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), a message broker following the publisher-subscriber paradigm. With this service, you can create topics and connect your application (publisher) with other services (subscribers), regardless of message formats and transport protocols.
With Site24x7's support for SNS, you can now gather and visualize data for all your SNS topics. The SNS metrics you can monitor with Site24x7 include:
Number of messages published
Once setup, you can start publishing messages to different subscribers over various protocols. But, if you are just starting AWS SNS in the free tier, there lies a cap in the number of messages you can publish to HTTP/S, email, and SMS endpoints. With this metric in hand, you can now know which are your most active SNS topics and also keep track of free tier SNS usage.
SNS payload size
SNS allows you to publish messages with sizes up to 256KB, but each of these large payloads will be billed as multiple, 64KB requests. So when your developer or application publishes a message with a payload size of 256 KB, it will be billed as four publish requests and four deliveries. Remember, with SNS, you pay for the notifications you publish and the notifications you deliver.
Also remember to check your SNS message before sending it, because every little character from quotes and brackets to spaces will count towards the 256 KB limit.
Number of notifications delivered or failed
From IP address notifications to messages published to invoke Lambda functions a lot depends on the operational efficiency of your SNS environment. Monitor message delivery over multiple transport protocols to ensure your push notifications, SMS deliveries, HTTP POST requests, and SQS messages reach their respective subscription endpoints.
SNS free tier is a great place to start, but remember that it's always prudent to be on your toes when dealing with a "pay as you go" pricing model. Monitor your SNS environment, stay informed about SNS usage, and make sure you don't burn up your free tier before you know it!
Signup for a 30 day free trial and start monitoring your AWS services today. If you already have a Site24x7 account log in and give the new service a try.