Amazon SNS

Overview

How it works

Amazon SNS supports HTTPS endpoints as subscription targets. You give SNS your NotiLens webhook URL as a subscription endpoint — every message published to the topic is delivered to NotiLens as an HTTP POST.

1. Copy your NotiLens webhook URL from the dashboard
2. Add it as an HTTPS subscription on your SNS topic
3. NotiLens auto-confirms the subscription
4. All SNS messages now appear in NotiLens

Setup

1. Get your NotiLens webhook URL

In the NotiLens dashboard, select or create a Custom Topic. Copy the webhook URL — it looks like this:

https://hook.notilens.com/webhook/<topic_id>/send

2. Add an HTTPS subscription in AWS

1. Open the AWS SNS console and select your topic.
2. Click Create subscription.
3. Set Protocol to HTTPS.
4. Paste your NotiLens webhook URL into the Endpoint field.
5. Leave Enable raw message delivery off — NotiLens needs the full SNS envelope to parse the message type.
6. Click Create subscription.

3. Subscription confirmation

SNS immediately sends a SubscriptionConfirmation POST to your endpoint. NotiLens handles this automatically — it visits the SubscribeURL in the payload to confirm the subscription on your behalf.

The subscription status in the AWS console changes from Pending confirmation to Confirmed within a few seconds.

Payload

SNS Message Format

SNS delivers a JSON envelope to your endpoint. NotiLens extracts the Subject and Message fields as the notification title and body.

{
  "Type"      : "Notification",
  "MessageId" : "a1b2c3d4-...",
  "TopicArn"  : "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my-topic",
  "Subject"   : "ALARM: CPUUtilization > 80%",
  "Message"   : "CPU usage on prod-server-01 has exceeded 80% for 5 minutes.",
  "Timestamp" : "2026-06-02T14:23:01.000Z",
  "Signature" : "..."
}

NotiLens ignores SubscriptionConfirmation and UnsubscribeConfirmation message types — only Notification payloads create alerts.

Events

Common SNS Use Cases