AWS Contact Center

Scale your contact center effectively with Amazon Connect and Service Quotas

Introduction

As Amazon Connect workloads grow, customers require visibility into quotas to efficiently manage scaling and prevent failed deployments or service disruptions from exceeding limits. The Amazon Connect integration with Service Quotas results in improved management of service quotas for your Amazon Connect instance.

Service Quotas serves as a hub for streamlined management and tracking of quotas across Amazon Web Services (AWS), whether through the Amazon Management Console or Amazon Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). For Amazon Connect, this integration unlocks greater control and flexibility in navigating and optimizing account and resource quota allocations. Using Service Quotas, you can manage Connect quotas in one central location, eliminating the need to go to multiple sources. For supported quotas, the integration with Amazon CloudWatch also allows proactive management through configurable alarms, providing timely alerts as you approach specified quotas.

Benefits

  1. Central management of Amazon Connect Service Quotas: Using Service Quotas, you can manage your Amazon Connect quotas in one central location, eliminating the need to go to multiple sources or maintain your own list. You can access Service Quotas either through the AWS Management Console or programmatically via API or AWS CLI.
  2. Improved visibility of quotas: In addition to viewing the default quota values, you can now view the applied value for resource-based (Connect instances) quotas. Applied quotas override the default quota value for your instance.
  3. Easier quota increase requests: You can view and manage quotas for both account-level quotas or resource-level quotas via the console or via API. For resource-level requests, you can select the specific instance (resource) to apply the adjustment to. You can also view and track the status of your requests.
  4. Accelerated response to quota increase requests: Amazon Connect has implemented automatic review and approval of quotas. For quota requests that are automatically approved, the time to complete the quota request will be reduced to minutes. If a request does not meet the automatic approval criteria, an AWS Support case will automatically generate.
  5. Paving the way for proactive quota management: Service Quotas integrates with CloudWatch to alert you when you reach a threshold, enabling you to proactively manage your quotas.
  6. Simplify quota requests for new accounts in AWS organizations: Customers often request quota increases for new accounts created in their organization. Service Quotas automates this process so that you spend less time requesting increases for new accounts in your organization, and ensures that all your accounts are consistently configured in accordance with the needs of your workloads.

Overview

In this blog, we will delve into the expanded scope of Amazon Connect that now supports resource management through the Service Quotas administration console and AWS CLI. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how administrators can configure and manage quotas for specific Amazon Connect resources.

Walkthrough

  • Using the Service Quotas Console to review Amazon Connect quotas and request a quota increase
  • Using the Service Quotas Console to review quota request history
  • Using the AWS CLI to request a quota increase
  • Using the AWS CLI to review the status of a quota request
  • Using the Service Quotas Console to review quota usage metrics
  • Using the Service Quotas Console to establish alerts for quota usage

 

Prerequisites

  • An Amazon Connect instance
  • IAM Permissions. You must have the service-quotas:RequestServiceQuotaIncrease permission to request a quota increase.
  • AWS CLI version. You will need AWS CLI version 2.13.20 or higher to use the AWS CLI to view and manage resource-level quotas for Amazon Connect.

Using Service Quotas console

Julie is a contact center administrator at AnyCompany financial which has been testing their production Connect instance in preparation for a new launch. Julie diligently ensures that her contact center is highly available and flexible to match contact and agent workloads. Her company uses multiple Amazon Connect instances to support multiple business units. She will need to add additional phone numbers to her largest consumer-facing instance, and she wants to review and increase the Phone numbers per instance quota for this instance.

  1. To review Amazon Connect quotas, Julie visits Service Quotas from the AWS Management Console, and navigates to the Amazon Connect page where she can view information about all the quotas for the service.

Service Quotas search page.

  1. Julie navigates down the page of all the available quotas, to find ‘Phone numbers per instance’. She clicks on the quota to see additional details

Amazon Connect Service Quotas search showing results for a search for Phone Numbers

  1. On the details page, Julie sees a list of all of her Amazon Connect instances, including her applied quota value for each instance. From here, Julie can select the appropriate Amazon Connect instance that needs a quota increase and select the ‘Request Increase at resource-level’

Phone Numbers per Instance Service Quotas page

  1. This will bring up a dialog window allowing her to enter the new quota value and submit the request.

Request form for increasing the Phone Numbers per Instance quota

  1. Returning to the Phone Numbers per instance details page, Julie can select the ‘Request History’ tab to view the status of current and previous quota requests. New requests will be in ‘Pending’ status. Clicking on the status will bring up the request details. If an AWS Support Case is required to process the quota increase, it is created automatically and a link to the AWS Support Case will be on the status details page.

request history for the Phone Numbers per Instance quota

Using the Service Quotas API to request an Amazon Connect quota increase

Service Quotas also provide an API to request quota increases. Julie can use the RequestServiceQuotaIncrease API to submit a request for a quota increase. Here Julie needs to increase the Phone numbers per instance quota for a different Amazon Connect instance from 10 to 11.

  1. Julie uses the AWS CLI to submit the request:

AWS CLI command executed to request an increase.

  1. Once the request is submitted, Julie can track the request by utilizing the GetRequestedServiceQuotaChange

AWS CLI command executed to check the status of a request

  1. She can verify if the new quota has been applied by using the GetServiceQuota The AWS CLI syntax for this request is:

aws service-quotas get-service-quota
–service-code connect
–quota-code <quota_code>
–context-id <connect_instance_arn>
–region <region>

Monitoring usage against quotas

Julie understands that her contact center makes frequent use of the StopContact API to remove queued callbacks from the queue. However, she would like visibility into the usage of this API against the quota.

  1. From within Service Quotas, she browses to the Rate of StopContact API requests within Amazon Connect.
  2. From here, she selects the ‘Monitoring’ tab to review the utilization graph from CloudWatch.

  1. Julie wants to be notified if this metric is approaching 100 percent utilization. She selects the ‘Alarms’ tab and clicks the ‘Create Alarm’
  2. Julie would like to be notified when the metric reaches 80 percent utilization, so she sets the threshold, enters a name for the alarm and clicks Create.

Service Quotas page to create a CloudWatch alarm against the StopContact API utilization.

Additional considerations

Utilization. When viewing the details of a selected service quota, the Utilization value displayed represents utilization of the applied quota visualized by CloudWatch. Utilization is available for Connect Public APIs.

Amazon Connect Global Resilience. For customers leveraging Amazon Connect Global Resiliency (ACGR), there is a quota sync process during the initial replication of the Amazon Connect instance to a second region. Service Quota requests are region-specific. After the initial replication, customers will need to submit separate service quota increases for each of the region to keep the ACGR instances in sync moving forward.

Clean up 

If you have created an Amazon Connect instance to test managing Amazon Connect quotas, you can follow our online guide for deleting an Amazon Connect instance.

Conclusion

Service Quotas allows you to view and manage quotas for AWS services from one central location. Service Quotas enables you to easily raise and track quota increase requests and integrates with AWS Organizations to save you time and effort in setting up quotas for new accounts in a consistent manner. In this blog, we showed you how to configure and manage quotas for Amazon Connect resources using Service Quotas.

For more information, please see:

Ready to transform your customer service experience with Amazon Connect? Contact us