Slackwatch: monitor your AWS service from Slack using Cloudwatch and SNS

Effective monitoring of services is crucial for maintaining high availability. AWS Cloudwatch, in conjunction with its Simple Notification Service (SNS), can create alarms and send notifications to the right people. However, sending these notifications to a chat app like Slack is more effective than email or SMS alone. Slack provides several benefits over traditional notification methods, including visibility of team members available to respond, mobile accessibility, easy control of notifications, and a convenient timeline for root cause analysis. To create a Slack alarm channel, follow these steps: 1) Create a Slack channel for alarms; 2) Add Slack email integration to get an email alias for the channel; 3) Create an SNS topic for your alarms; 4) Create a subscription to the SNS topic that sends email to the email alias from step 2; and 5) Set notifications for alarms to go to the appropriate SNS topic.