Send real-time alerts using Amazon Pinpoint

Businesses need to send real-time notifications in order to take action when alerted of a critical situation. Examples could include anomaly detection, healthcare emergencies, operations failures, and fraud transactions. Email, SMS, and push notifications are often used to notify stakeholders in real-time. However, building a large-scale, real-time notification solution can be a complex and costly challenge for a business.

Amazon Pinpoint enables you to engage with your stakeholders in real-time by sending email, SMS and push notifications. Your app can use the Amazon Pinpoint API and the AWS SDKs to send direct messages. With transactional messages, you send alerts to specific recipients, as opposed to messages that you send to segments. There is no minimum fee, no setup cost, and no fixed monthly cost with Amazon Pinpoint.

In this blog, we explore a solution to notify stakeholders of a large customer transaction. This requires immediate attention as our stakeholders want to ensure that there is enough inventory available to deliver goods with no delay.

Solution Overview

The solution that we build to handle this use case can be deployed in one hour. The following diagram illustrates the AWS services integrated in this solution:

At a high level, the solution uses the following workflow:

1. Define large value transaction threshold in rule table in Amazon DynamoDB.
2. Setup Amazon Pinpoint and configure to send email and SMS.
3. Setup AWS Lambda and implement the logic to send SMS and email if a customer makes a large value order transaction.
4. Create a test transaction in an order table using Amazon DynamoDB.
5. Check details of SMS and email received.

Setting up the solution

Step 1: Set up Amazon Pinpoint

The first step in setting up this solution is to create a new Amazon Pinpoint project and configure the SMS and Email channel.
1. Navigate to Services -> Pinpoint.
2.Click on create a project.
3. Provide a name and click on the Create button.
4. Select Email in left panel and click on Edit.
5. Select “Enable the email channel for this project”. Select “Verify a new email address” and provide a default sender address. Click on verify email address. Click on save. You should get a verification mail. Verify the email by clicking on the verification link.

Once your email is verified, it should look like this:

6. Repeat the same step to verify receiver email address as well.

Please note: By enabling the email channel, we can send up to 200 email per day in sandbox mode. We must verify an email address or domain identity in order to send any email. While we remain in sandbox, we also must verify all recipient email addresses before we proceed — this does not apply in production.

7. Select SMS and voice in left panel and select “Enable the SMS channel for this project”. Please make sure “Transactional” is selected for critical or time-sensitive messages. Amazon Pinpoint optimizes the delivery of these messages for highest reliability.

Please note: We do not need to verify any phone numbers for this channel. However, we can request dedicated codes (either short or long) for our own exclusive use. Otherwise AWS will automatically allocate codes when we send SMS.

8. Note down the project ID.

We have done all the configurations in Amazon Pinpoint. Now, it’s time to setup Amazon DynamoDB tables.

Step 2: Set up Amazon DynamoDB table

1. Navigate to Services -> DynamoDB.
2. Click Create table.
3. Create a record similar to this:

This table stores your definition of large-value order transaction.

{
		"transaction_type" : "premium"
		"min_transaction_value" : 10000
		"max_transaction_value" : 50000
		"send_notification" : ""
		"unit" : "$"
		"email" : "test@gmail.com"
		"phone" : "+91123456789"
		
	
	}

4. Create order_detail table. Provide order_id as partition key. You can select “String” as data type.
5. Now we must enable the stream in this table. Once we enable a stream on a table, Amazon DynamoDB captures information about every modification to data items in the table. We will integrate this table with AWS Lambda to validate the order value. Click on Manage Stream.
6. Select appropriate view type and click on Enable.

Step 3: Set up AWS Lambda

In this step, we create an AWS Lambda function and then integrate it with the order_detail table. After, we will check the order and send a notification if large enough.

1. Navigate to Service>Lambda.
2.Click on Create function.
3. Select runtime as Python 3.6. Select an execution role. Please make sure that your role gives read access to Amazon DynamoDB table.
4. Click on Add Trigger.
5. Select the Amazon DynamoDB table from the drop-down. Select order_detail table from the drop-down. Keep everything default. This integrates order_detail streaming to our AWS Lambda function.

Our Lambda function is invoked every time a transaction happens in order_detail table.

6. Now copy the source code.

The AWS Lambda code is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/aws-samples/send-real-time-notification-using-amazon-pinpoint-samples

Step 4: Testing

1. That’s it! We have built the solution. Now it’s time to do an end to end test by creating an order transaction in order_detail table.

2. Run the Amazon DynamoDB put-item command to create a new item over our threshhold, or replace an old item with a new one. In our case it will be a new order transaction in order_detail table. Please make sure you have configured AWS CLI. You can refer to the quickstart guide to learn more.

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name order_detail --item "{""order_id"":{""S"":""O0001""},""customer_id"":{""S"":""C0001""},""customer_name"":{""S"":""JOHN MILLER""},""order_date"":{""S"":""2020-06-13T17:42:34Z""},""item_id"":{""S"":""P0001""},""item_quantity"":{""N"":""12""},""order_value"":{""N"":""20000""},""unit"":{""S"":""$""},""delivery_date"":{""S"":""2020-06-20""}}" --return-consumed-capacity TOTAL

3. It returns a success message similar to this:

4. The order value of $20,000 is falling in the range of our large value order transaction definition (between $10,000 to $50,000). You should receive an SMS on the mobile number you have provided in the transaction_alert_rule table.

5. You will also receive an email as per configuration in the transaction_alert_rule table.

Step 4: Clean up

You’ve now successfully built our real-time notification solution using Amazon Pinpoint. Delete the resource you created in this blog like the Amazon DynamoDB tables to avoid ongoing charges. You can use the AWS CLI, AWS Management Consoles, or the AWS APIs to perform the cleanup.

Conclusion

Customers can use Amazon Pinpoint to help scale communications across use cases, including real-time notifications. Amazon Pinpoint is a flexible and scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service. You can connect with customers and stakeholders over channels like email, SMS, push, or voice.

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