This guide walks you through forwarding CloudWatch alarms from AWS into Scaling so thatDocumentation Index
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OK → ALARM opens an incident and ALARM → OK resolves it.
For an overview of the integration, see AWS CloudWatch. If your alarms are defined in AWS CDK, see Ingest CloudWatch Alarms with AWS CDK instead — the OK transition needs explicit wiring there.
Prerequisites
- A Scaling component representing the AWS service you want to monitor (e.g., Payments API).
- Access to the AWS account that hosts the CloudWatch alarms, with permission to create SNS topics and modify alarm actions.
- The Admin role in your Scaling organization.
Create an AWS integration in Scaling
Go to Settings → Integrations → AWS and click Add integration.
- Name — a short label (e.g.,
Production us-east-1). Visible in the dashboard only. - Component — the catalog component this integration’s alarms should open incidents on.
Copy the webhook URL
Scaling shows you a one-time reveal screen with a unique webhook URL:Copy this URL now. It is shown once — Scaling stores only a hash. If you lose it, delete the integration and create a new one.
Create an SNS topic in AWS
In the AWS console (or via Terraform / CDK), create a new SNS topic:
- Type: Standard (not FIFO).
- Region: the same region as the alarms you want to forward.
- Name: something descriptive, e.g.,
scaling-alarms.
Subscribe the webhook URL to the topic
Add an HTTPS subscription to the topic, pasting the webhook URL you copied from Scaling. Set If you subscribed via the console (where Scaling auto-confirms the subscription on first delivery and pins the topic ARN onto the integration. You don’t need to click any confirmation link.Within a few seconds the subscription should show Status: Confirmed in the AWS console.
SignatureVersion=2 so SNS signs with RSA-SHA256 — Scaling rejects the legacy RSA-SHA1 (SignatureVersion=1) default.SignatureVersion isn’t exposed) or have an older subscription you can’t recreate, update it in place:Route your alarms to the topic
On each CloudWatch alarm you want forwarded:
- Open the alarm in the CloudWatch console.
- Under Actions, add the SNS topic as a notification target for both the
In alarmandOKstate changes.
alarm_actions and ok_actions on the alarm:INSUFFICIENT_DATA notifications are ignored by Scaling, so you don’t need to suppress them.Verify end-to-end
Trigger one of the alarms (or temporarily lower its threshold) to force an
OK → ALARM transition. Within a few seconds:- A new incident appears in Scaling tagged with the mapped component.
- If the component has an escalation policy attached, the on-call responder is paged.
OK. The open incident should auto-resolve.One integration per topic
Each AWS integration maps to one Scaling component. If you want alarms on different services to open incidents on different components, create one SNS topic and one Scaling integration per component. A common pattern:Cross-region
CloudWatch alarms are region-scoped, but SNS topics can deliver to HTTPS endpoints anywhere. You can route alarms from multiple AWS regions into a single Scaling integration by creating one topic per region and subscribing the same Scaling webhook URL to each.Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Subscription stays in “Pending confirmation” | The webhook URL is wrong, or DNS isn’t routing. Double-check the URL was pasted correctly. |
Subscription stuck “Pending” and Scaling logs weak_signature_version | Your subscription is on SignatureVersion=1. Update it with aws sns set-subscription-attributes --attribute-name SignatureVersion --attribute-value 2. |
| Alarm fires in AWS but no incident appears | Confirm the alarm has the SNS topic in its alarm_actions, and the topic ARN matches what’s pinned. |
Notifications rejected with topic_arn_mismatch | The integration is pinned to a different topic. Delete the integration and recreate it. |
| Same alarm opens multiple incidents | Check that OK actions are also routed to the topic — otherwise Scaling can’t detect the recovery. |
Removing the integration
Delete the integration in Settings → Integrations → AWS. Further deliveries to the webhook URL return404. Remove the HTTPS subscription from the SNS topic on the AWS side to stop AWS retries.