CloudFormation stack notifications not configured

Configure an SNS topic for stack events.

Description

CloudFormation’s NotificationARNs specifies SNS topics that receive stack events. Without these notifications or another monitoring path, deployment failures and rollbacks may be noticed late.

Potential impact

Missed stack-state changes can delay responses to deployment problems.

Remediation

Add SNS topic ARNs to NotificationARNs, and configure publishing permissions and subscriptions. Verify that operators actually receive the events.

Examples

These excerpts add an SNS topic to a nested stack. Set the template URL and parameters to match the actual nested template.

Before

yaml
Resources:
  myStackWithParams:
    Type: AWS::CloudFormation::Stack
    Properties:
      TemplateURL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-2/EC2ChooseAMI.template
      Parameters:
        InstanceType: t1.micro
        KeyName: mykey

After

yaml
Resources:
  myStackWithParams:
    Type: AWS::CloudFormation::Stack
    Properties:
      NotificationARNs:
        - "arn:aws:sns:ap-northeast-2:123456789012:stack-alerts"
      TemplateURL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-2/EC2ChooseAMI.template
      Parameters:
        InstanceType: t1.micro
        KeyName: mykey

References