AWS Database Blog

Events and Notifications in AWS Database Migration Service

We’ve recently added a new feature in AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)—the ability to receive DMS events notifications, such as email messages, text messages, or calls to HTTP endpoints, through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

You now can subscribe and receive notifications for two types of events—events related to DMS instances and events related to replication tasks. Events related to DMS instances include those for availability, configuration change, creation, deletion, and maintenance. For example, when a DMS instance goes down for maintenance, a notification is triggered.

Events related to replication tasks include those such as start, pause, finish, Full Load completed, CDC started, and many more. For example, when a migration task finishes to migrate the entire data, it will trigger a “Full Load completed” notification. If the task is configured to follow Full Load mode with CDC mode (that is, replicate the changes in the data since the Full Load began), a “CDC started” notification is triggered next.

In addition, AWS DMS groups events into categories that you can subscribe to using the AWS DMS console or the AWS DMS API. This subscription means you can be notified when an event occurs in the category you subscribed to. For example, if you subscribe to the creation category for a given replication instance, you are notified whenever a creation-related event occurs that affects your replication instance, such as a replication instance is being created.

The following list represents the possible categories for subscription for the DMS replication instance at this time:

  • Configuration change—a replication instance configuration is being changed
  • Creation—a replication instance is being created
  • Deletion—a replication instance is being deleted
  • Maintenance—offline maintenance of replication instance is taking place
  • Low storage—the free storage for the replication instance
  • Failover—failover for a Multi-AZ instance, when enabled, has begun or finished
  • Failure—the replication instance has gone into storage failure or has failed due to incompatible network

The following list represents the possible categories for subscription for the DMS replication task at this time:

  • State change—the replication task has started or stopped
  • Creation—the replication task has being created
  • Deletion—the replication task has been deleted
  • Failure—the replication task has failed

For a list of the events and event categories provided by AWS DMS, see AWS DMS Event Categories and Event Messages in the documentation.

To subscribe to AWS DMS events, do the following:

  1. Create an Amazon SNS topic. In the topic, you specify what type of notification you want to receive and what address or number the notification will go to.
  2. Create an AWS DMS event notification subscription using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS DMS API.
  3. When you receive an AWS DMS approval email or SMS message to the address you submitted with your subscription, click the link in the approval email or SMS message to confirm your subscription.

When you have confirmed the subscription, the status of your subscription is updated in the AWS DMS console’s Event Subscriptions section.

You then begin to receive event notifications.

For more information about table mapping using the console, see the DMS documentation.

For more information about AWS Database Migration Service in general, see our website.

About the Author

Eran Schitzer is a product manager for Database Migration Services at Amazon Web Services.