HOW TO receive notifications about AWS & Azure incidents & outages over email, SMS

Both AWS & Azure provide RSS feeds for all incidents related to the cloud services they provide from their globally distributed data centers.

Services like IFTTT & Azure Logic Apps can be used to parse the RSS feed & have them send notificatons via email or text message

Azure Logic Apps is an Azure service for implementing simple, scalable integration and workflow across applications.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web based automation service for small tasks between Internet-connected services. The "This" in "If This Then That" stands for a trigger while the "That" stands for an action. The trigger-action combinations are called recipes.

The IFTTT RSS feed to email recipe takes a Feed URL as trigger and the action can be set to send an email while the IFTTT RSS feed to Text Message recipe takes a Feed URL as trigger and the action can be set to send a text message
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If the services are healthy, you don't see anything in the RSS feed. You only see data coming in RSS feed when there's an issue.


Azure Logic App can also be configured to monitor the Azure Status RSS Feed & send an email when any activity is triggered through the RSS feed

Other programmatic methods involving ARM templates targeting Azure Resource Manager Insights APIPowerShell & WebJobs can also be used to trigger alerts caused by health incidents.

In the past, Azure provided a RSS feed by region for each service as AWS does. The RSS feed URL for Amazon Simple Storage Service (N. California) is https://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/s3-us-west-1.rss

Currently, Azure reports incidents of all regions through a single RSS feed

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