AWS SES or SNS for monitoring variables for program within EC2 instance

Question

Instead of having to log into my instance to check the logs, I would like to implement the ability to be notified whenever a variable within my program goes below a certain point.

It looks like AWS SES would be the easiest since I tell it exactly when to notify me but it looks like I have to set the sender and receiver emails to be the same which doesn't seem very professional.

AWS SNS is perfect but doesn't seem like I have it monitor variables within my application. Seems to good for monitoring my EC2 instances.

I'm confused which would be best for my case.

Answer 1

SES is primarily for sending out bulk emails. For your use case SNS is the perfect option if you want to do more than just receiving email.

Basically you can create a cloudwatch matrix for your variable and then create a cloudwatch alarm based on that matrix.

Now you can either enter your email id in the notification for this alarm or you can have this alarm notify an SNS topic and then you subscribe your email address to this SNS Topic.

However the 2nd option of SNS would be more meaningful if you want to take some auto correcting measure (maybe by invoking Lambda). If you just want to be notified then you can go with option 1 and not unnecessarily use SNS