Setting Up Cloudwatch Alarm Notifications

This sets up the notification plumbing for CloudWatch alarms using SNS topics and subscriptions. You'll use it when you need alerts to actually reach people via email, SMS, or webhooks instead of just firing silently into the void. It handles the encrypted topic creation, configures the IAM policies so CloudWatch can publish to SNS, and walks through linking everything together. The troubleshooting section covers the usual gotchas like unconfirmed email subscriptions and phone numbers not being in E.164 format. Solid for getting the alerting infrastructure right the first time instead of debugging why notifications aren't showing up during an actual incident.

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last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill setting-up-cloudwatch-alarm-notifications --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Setting Up CloudWatch Alarm Notifications

Overview

Domain expertise for configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarm notification channels using Amazon SNS topics and subscriptions. Covers creating encrypted SNS topics, setting up subscriptions for email, SMS, and webhook endpoints, configuring topic policies for CloudWatch access, and linking alarms to notification actions.

Set up alarm notifications

To configure notification channels for a CloudWatch alarm, follow the procedure exactly. See CloudWatch alarm notification setup procedure.

Troubleshooting

Email notifications not received

Verify the email subscription was confirmed. Use aws sns list-subscriptions-by-topic to check that the subscription status is "Confirmed" rather than "PendingConfirmation".