Storing values through AWS lambda

Question

I am using AWS Lambda to check the health status and then send out an email. If the health is down I want it to send an email only once.

This Lambda function runs every 20minutes or so and I would like to prevent it from sending out multiple emails in interval if things have broken. Is there a way store environment variables or something in the AWS eco system so that it knows the state between each lambda function runs. (that way it doesnt send out an email and knows it has sent an email already).

I have looked into creating an alarm and sending out notifications but the email sent out through alarm wont do and I would like to have a custom email sent out, so I am using AWS SES through lambda. There is a cloud watch alarm that turns on when there is an error but I cant seem to fetch the state of alarm through the aws-sdk (its apparently not there).

I have written the function in NodeJS

Any suggestions ?

Answer 1

I've implemented something like this a little differently. I too do not care for getting an email for each error, since the errors I receive from my AWS Lambdas do not require immediate attention. I prefer to get them once an hour.

So I write all the errors I receive to an SQS queue. I configure the AWS Lambdas, which are throwing the errors, to send certain errors (configurable via environment variables) to certain SQS queues. Cloudwatch rules (running whenever), configured to pull from specific SQS queues in the Cloudwatch rule definition, then execute an AWS Lambda passing in the rule definition containing the SQS queue to pull from. The Lambda called by the CloudWatch rule handles reading from the SQS queue then emailing the results.

For your case you could modify that process to read all the errors from SQS, then filter that data down to the results you want to send. I use SQS because the "errors" I get don't need to be persisted.

Answer 2

I could see two quick ways to store something like a "last_email_sent" value. The first would be in DynamoDB. This is part of the AWS "serverless" environment that doesn't require you to do much more than interact with it. You didn't indicate your development environment but there are multiple development environments that are supported.

The second would be with the SSM Parameter Store. You can store any number of parameters there too.

There are likely other ways to do this too. Both of these are a bit of overkill but they would work to store what you need.

Answer 3

Alright, I found a better way that is simpler without dealing with other constraints. The NodeJS sdk is limited as it is. When the service is down create an alarm through the sdk and the next time the lambda gets triggered check if the alarm exists and send an email. That way if you want to do some notification through alarm it is possible too.

I think in my question I said this was not possible (last part), which I will retract.

Here is the link for the sdk reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/latest/AWS/CloudWatch.html