Monitoring Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

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Monitor your Amazon SNS service with Instana for end-to-end visibility and real-time insights into your service performance.

For more information, see Amazon SNS.

To monitor Amazon SNS, install the Instana agent in your environment. The agent automatically installs and enables the Amazon SNS sensor, collecting Amazon SNS related metrics. You can view these metrics in the Instana UI.

For more information about the other supported AWS services, see the AWS documentation.

Adding required IAM permissions

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Add the following IAM role permissions to the host that is running the Instana agent so that the Instana agent discovers and monitors your AWS SNS instances:

  • cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics
  • cloudwatch:GetMetricData
  • sns:ListTopics
  • sns:ListTagsForResource
  • sns:GetTopicAttributes

Configuring the Amazon SNS sensor

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After the Instana agent is installed, the Amazon SNS sensor is enabled by default.

Disabling the Amazon SNS sensor

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To disable monitoring of Amazon SNS instances, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  enabled: false

Setting the metric collection interval

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By default, metrics for SNS are pulled every 5 minutes. To change this frequency, edit the cloudwatch_period value in the agent configuration file <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yml as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  cloudwatch_period: 300

Setting proxy configurations

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To configure the Amazon SNS sensor to use proxy configuration, add the following agent configuration settings:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  proxy_host: 'example.com' # proxy host name or ip address
  proxy_port: 3128 # proxy port
  proxy_protocol: 'HTTP' # proxy protocol: HTTP or HTTPS
  proxy_username: 'username' # OPTIONAL: proxy username
  proxy_password: 'password' # OPTIONAL: proxy password

Configuring monitoring of Amazon SNS across multiple AWS accounts

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You can set up monitoring of multiple AWS accounts with one AWS agent in the same region. For more information, see Monitoring multiple AWS accounts.

To configure the Instana agent to monitor Amazon SNS across multiple AWS accounts, use any one of the following approaches:

AWS named profiles approach

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To override the profiles that are used to monitor Amazon SNS, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  profile_names:
    - 'profile2'
    - 'profile3'
Note: Defining profiles on service level overrides the global AWS profile configuration.

AWS Security Token Service (STS) approach

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To override the IAM roles that are used to monitor Amazon SNS, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  role_arns:
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_1_id>:role/<role_1_name>'
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_2_id>:role/<role_2_name>'
Note: Defining IAM roles on the service level overrides the global AWS IAM roles configuration.

Filtering Amazon SNS services by defining tags

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Note: If you want to monitor all Amazon SNS services without filtering, avoid defining any configuration.

Instana monitors all Amazon SNS services by default. However, if you don't want to monitor all services, define which tags you want to include or exclude from discovery in the agent configuration.yaml file. If you define a tag or resource group in both lists (include and exclude), the exclude list takes precedence.

To define multiple tags, separate them with commas. Define tags as a key-value pair that is separated by a colon (:). You needn't define all values to enable filtering.

To include services by tags in discovery, update the configuration.yaml file as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  include_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:prod,env:staging)

To exclude services by tags from discovery, update the configuration.yaml file as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  exclude_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:dev,env:test)

Amazon SNS services without tags are monitored by default but can be excluded by setting the include_untagged field to false as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.aws.sns:
  include_untagged: false # True value by default

Setting poll rate

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You can specify how often sensors poll the AWS tagged resources by using the tagged-services-poll-rate configuration property. By default, 300 seconds.

Note: Tags are only available with the AWS Agent.

To define how often sensors poll the tagged resources, update the configuration.yaml file as shown in the following example:

com.instana.plugin.aws:
  tagged-services-poll-rate: 60 #default 300

Viewing metrics

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To view the metrics, complete the following steps:

  1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, click Infrastructure.
  2. Click a specified host.

You can see a host dashboard with all the collected metrics and monitored processes. Metrics are pulled every 5 minutes.

Tracked configuration

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The following table outlines the configuration data that the sensor collects from Amazon SNS instances:

SNS Topic Details Description
ARN The unqualified Amazon Resource Name (ARN) assigned to the topic.
Availability Zone The location of the instance.
Topic Name The topic name.
Display Name The user-defined topic name.
Subscriptions Confirmed The number of subscriptions that are confirmed.
Number Of Retries The number of notification retry limits.
Minimum Delay Target The minimum delay to the target subscription.
Maximum Delay Target The maximum delay to the target subscription.

Metrics

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The following table outlines the metrics that the sensor collects from Amazon SNS instances:

Topic metrics Description
NumberOfMessagesPublished The number of messages that are published to your Amazon SNS topics.
NumberOfNotificationsFailedToRedriveToDlq The number of messages that are not moved to a dead-letter queue.
NumberOfNotificationsDelivered The number of messages that are successfully delivered from your Amazon SNS topics to subscribing endpoints.
PublishSize The size of messages published.
NumberOfNotificationsRedrivenToDlq The number of messages that are moved to a dead-letter queue.
NumberOfNotificationsFailed The number of messages that Amazon SNS failed to deliver.
NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut The number of messages that are rejected by subscription filter policies. A filter policy rejects a message when the message attributes don't match the policy attributes.