Manage and view your AWS Health notifications in AWS User Notifications service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now offers AWS managed notifications, a centralized way to manage and view default notifications in AWS User Notifications. Currently, only AWS Health events are available as managed notifications. With this new feature, you can stay informed about critical updates related to operations and account health. AWS User notifications channels include the Console Notifications Center, Email, Slack and Microsoft Teams chat channels with Amazon Q Developer in chat applications, and push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App.

Let’s take a tour of the key capabilities:

Consolidated Notification Center: AWS User Notifications brings together both managed and user-configured notifications into one centralized Notification Center within the AWS Console. Previously, you had to monitor AWS Health events separately through the Health dashboard and email notifications. Now, you can view and manage notifications across all your AWS accounts, services, and regions in this unified console experience. This consolidation makes it easier to stay informed about important events, updates, and alerts affecting your AWS resources, without having to switch between different channels. The Notification Center, accessible from the top navigation bell icon in the AWS Console, provides a central place to configure notification preferences and stay on top of your AWS environment.

Image 1: Navigation bell menu

Image 2: Console notifications center

Customizable Delivery Preferences: Out of the box, AWS Managed Notifications are sent to the primary contact and alternate contacts you’ve configured (Billing, Security, and Operations emails). But now, you can customize where and how you receive these notifications.

Under AWS managed notifications subscriptions, you can subscribe or unsubscribe the default account contacts for different notification categories like Security or Health operations. You can also add more email addresses, mobile devices for push notifications, or chat channels like Slack or Microsoft-Teams. This flexibility allows you to set up notifications flows tailored to your organization’s needs and communication channel preferences.

Image 3: AWS managed notifications subscriptions – main page

Image 4: AWS managed notifications subscriptions – Billing notifications category

Reduced Notification Noise: Another great benefit is that related notification events are now bundled together to reduce the overall volume of messages you receive. For example, a Health Planned Lifecycle Event (like RDS certificate rotation) affecting multiple accounts will be sent as a single aggregated notification, instead of separate notifications for each impacted account and its resources.

Image 5: Aggregate notification details – related events summary and related notifications shown at the bottom

Getting Started with AWS Managed Notifications

AWS managed notifications helps you centralize and streamline how you receive and manage important AWS Health notifications. This guide walks you through enabling and configuring the service to optimize your notification experience.

Enabling AWS managed notifications

Enabling managed notifications gives you a centralized view of important updates about your AWS environment, making it easier to track and respond to service updates and health events.

To enable AWS managed notifications:

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Console Notifications Center.
2. Navigate to AWS managed notifications subscriptions.
3. Choose Enable AWS Health Notifications.

Once enabled, new AWS Health notifications will appear in the Console Notification Center.

Key Configuration Steps and Their Benefits

Enabling trusted access for AWS Organizations

If you do not use AWS Organizations, skip to ‘Managing notification subscriptions’.

Why this matters: Enabling trusted access allows User Notifications to aggregate events in your management account and reduce duplicate email notifications. Without this feature, your management account won’t have oversight over accounts within the organization, and you’ll receive separate email notifications for each account in your organization (even when the email address is the same). With trusted access enabled:

• Events from all member accounts are aggregated in the management account by your Organization’s ID
• Duplicate email notifications are eliminated when the same email address is used in both management and member accounts (both the management and member accounts will need to enable managed notifications to benefit from this)

To enable trusted access:

1. Sign in to your AWS Organizations management account and open the Console Notifications Center.
2. Navigate to Organizations setting.
3. Choose Enable trusted access.

Managing notification subscriptions

Best Practice: Using distinct email addresses for different contact types creates clear ownership and prevents notification overlap. This ensures that teams receive only relevant alerts and reduces the risk of important notifications being missed.

To configure your subscriptions:

1. Open the AWS managed notifications subscriptions page.
2. Choose Manage subscriptions.
3. Review the default subscriptions for each category.
4. (optional) Configure separate email addresses for each contact type:
   1. Operations
   2. Security
   3. Billing
5. (optional) Subscribe / unsubscribe account contacts

Updating email rules for AWS Health notifications

Important Context: If you’ve set up email rules based on sender ID or content parsing, you’ll need to update them to maintain your notification workflow. Health emails will be sent from health@aws.com, and the new format includes enhanced metadata and management features like unsubscribe links. Learn more about What will change if I enable managed notifications?

To update your email rules:

1. Verify that AWS Health notifications are enabled.
2. Update any existing email rules to recognize messages from health@aws.com.
3. Modify email routing rules to accommodate the new email format, which includes:
   1. Additional notification metadata
   2. Unsubscribe link

Creating custom notification configurations

Strategic Value: Custom notification configurations complement your managed notifications by allowing you to fine-tune your notification strategy based on service criticality and team responsibilities. For example, you can filter notifications for specific services or event type categories. This means you can ensure high-priority alerts reach the right teams through their preferred channels while filtering out less relevant notifications.

To create a notification configurations:

1. Navigate to the notification configurations page.
2. Choose Create configuration.
3. Select the services you want to be notified about.
4. Choose specific event types to filter
   1. See examples for setting up AWS Health events about specific services and event type categories.
5. Configure your preferred notification channels.

Migrating from AWS Health Aware (AHA)

If you do not use AHA, you can skip to ‘Conclusion’.

Why Migrate: User Notifications is a managed AWS service, which offers several advantages over AHA:

• Improved integration with AWS services
• Additional delivery channels: Console Notifications Center and AWS Console Mobile Application
• Enhanced filtering capabilities
• Simplified management interface
• Flexibility to configure organizational and per-account notifications

While AHA will remain available in aws-samples on GitHub, migrating to User Notifications gives you access to these new features and improvements.

Conclusion

This blog post introduced managed notifications, a new feature in User Notifications service that provides a centralized way to manage and view important Health notifications. It covered the consolidated Notification Center within the Console, customizable delivery preferences, reduced notification noise through bundling of related events, and integration with Organizations. The post also walked through enabling the feature, managing subscriptions, enabling trusted access for Organizations, updating email rules, creating custom notification configurations, and migrating from AHA.

We’re excited to deliver this enhancement and improve your ability to effectively monitor changes impacting your AWS environment. Give AWS managed notifications a try and let us know what you think! For more details, visit the AWS User Notifications product page.

We encourage you to try AWS managed notifications and share your feedback as we continue to enhance this service.