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#sns

2 stories

Banner: a CloudWatch alarm stuck in a grey insufficient data state while the service graph drops to nothing

Cloud & Infrastructure Bug Report

CloudWatch alarm stayed in INSUFFICIENT_DATA during an outage and never paged anyone

John Nguyen · Jul 31, 2026 · 9 min read

Our order worker stopped completely for 47 minutes and the throughput alarm never fired. With no datapoints arriving, the alarm moved to INSUFFICIENT_DATA instead of ALARM, and only ALARM had an action. The fix was choosing missing data treatment per alarm.

Banner: SNS to SQS fan-out delivered JSON as an escaped string inside an envelope

Cloud & Infrastructure Bug Report

SNS to SQS fan-out delivered our JSON as an escaped string inside an envelope: raw message delivery

Tomás Herrera · Dec 8, 2024 · 8 min read

We put SNS in front of an SQS queue to fan out order events, and the consumer Lambda started failing with KeyError: 'orderId'. Each SQS message body was now an SNS envelope with our event as an escaped JSON string in Message. How raw message delivery fixes it, and what changes for filtering and attributes.