AWS Compute Blog

Monitoring your Amazon SNS message filtering activity with Amazon CloudWatch

This post is courtesy of Otavio Ferreira, Manager, Amazon SNS, AWS Messaging.

Amazon SNS message filtering provides a set of string and numeric matching operators that allow each subscription to receive only the messages of interest. Hence, SNS message filtering can simplify your pub/sub messaging architecture by offloading the message filtering logic from your subscriber systems, as well as the message routing logic from your publisher systems.

After you set the subscription attribute that defines a filter policy, the subscribing endpoint receives only the messages that carry attributes matching this filter policy. Other messages published to the topic are filtered out for this subscription. In this way, the native integration between SNS and Amazon CloudWatch provides visibility into the number of messages delivered, as well as the number of messages filtered out.

CloudWatch metrics are captured automatically for you. To get started with SNS message filtering, see Filtering Messages with Amazon SNS.

Message Filtering Metrics

The following six CloudWatch metrics are relevant to understanding your SNS message filtering activity:

  • NumberOfMessagesPublished – Inbound traffic to SNS. This metric tracks all the messages that have been published to the topic.
  • NumberOfNotificationsDelivered – Outbound traffic from SNS. This metric tracks all the messages that have been successfully delivered to endpoints subscribed to the topic. A delivery takes place either when the incoming message attributes match a subscription filter policy, or when the subscription has no filter policy at all, which results in a catch-all behavior.
  • NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut – This metric tracks all the messages that were filtered out because they carried attributes that didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
  • NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut-NoMessageAttributes – This metric tracks all the messages that were filtered out because they didn’t carry any attributes at all and, consequently, didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
  • NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut-InvalidAttributes – This metric keeps track of messages that were filtered out because they carried invalid or malformed attributes and, thus, didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
  • NumberOfNotificationsFailed – This last metric tracks all the messages that failed to be delivered to subscribing endpoints, regardless of whether a filter policy had been set for the endpoint. This metric is emitted after the message delivery retry policy is exhausted, and SNS stops attempting to deliver the message. At that moment, the subscribing endpoint is likely no longer reachable. For example, the subscribing SQS queue or Lambda function has been deleted by its owner. You may want to closely monitor this metric to address message delivery issues quickly.

Message filtering graphs

Through the AWS Management Console, you can compose graphs to display your SNS message filtering activity. The graph shows the number of messages published, delivered, and filtered out within the timeframe you specify (1h, 3h, 12h, 1d, 3d, 1w, or custom).

SNS message filtering for CloudWatch Metrics

To compose an SNS message filtering graph with CloudWatch:

  1. Open the CloudWatch console.
  2. Choose Metrics, SNS, All Metrics, and Topic Metrics.
  3. Select all metrics to add to the graph, such as:
    • NumberOfMessagesPublished
    • NumberOfNotificationsDelivered
    • NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut
  4. Choose Graphed metrics.
  5. In the Statistic column, switch from Average to Sum.
  6. Title your graph with a descriptive name, such as “SNS Message Filtering”

After you have your graph set up, you may want to copy the graph link for bookmarking, emailing, or sharing with co-workers. You may also want to add your graph to a CloudWatch dashboard for easy access in the future. Both actions are available to you on the Actions menu, which is found above the graph.

Summary

SNS message filtering defines how SNS topics behave in terms of message delivery. By using CloudWatch metrics, you gain visibility into the number of messages published, delivered, and filtered out. This enables you to validate the operation of filter policies and more easily troubleshoot during development phases.

SNS message filtering can be implemented easily with existing AWS SDKs by applying message and subscription attributes across all SNS supported protocols (Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, HTTP, SMS, email, and mobile push). CloudWatch metrics for SNS message filtering is available now, in all AWS Regions.

For information about pricing, see the CloudWatch pricing page.

For more information, see: