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Grada

Alert Notifications

grada has two notification paths that solve different problems. They are independent mechanisms — set up one, the other, or both:

  • grada alerts — pages a human when the live service errors (ECS-only, email delivery).
  • Drift Slack posts — tells a channel when out-of-band console changes drift Terraform (any target, via the drift.yml workflow).

Service alarms with grada alerts

Section titled “Service alarms with grada alerts”

Your stack already includes a dashboard 5xx alarm, but an alarm with no subscriber notifies nobody. grada alerts scaffolds the missing half:

Terminal window
npx grada-run alerts        # writes terraform/alerts.tf (refuses to overwrite without --force)
npx grada-run apply         # provisions the topic and alarm

This creates an <project>-alerts SNS topic plus a <project>-5xx-notify alarm (more than 10 5xx responses in 2 minutes, mirroring the dashboard thresholds), wired to publish into the topic. Re-running with --force replaces alerts.tf in place.

SNS requires every subscriber to confirm, so the last step is manual — subscribe an email address, then click the confirmation link:

Terminal window
aws sns subscribe --topic-arn <topic-arn> --protocol email \
  --notification-endpoint you@example.com

Find <topic-arn> in the SNS console (or in the apply output); confirm the subscription shows Confirmed before relying on it. Until someone confirms, alarms publish into a topic with no listeners.

Email is the only delivery today. Raw Slack/Discord webhook URLs cannot complete the SNS confirmation handshake, so they need a forwarding Lambda that grada does not generate yet — email works end to end, chat webhooks are documented future work. On --target lambda and --target static projects alerts exits with a clear error: there is no ALB to alarm on.

Drift alerts to Slack

Section titled “Drift alerts to Slack”

Separately, the opt-in drift workflow can post to a Slack channel when terraform plan detects drift. Set a SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL repository secret and the daily 06:00 UTC run posts a warning with the plan summary alongside opening (or updating) the iac-drift GitHub Issue. This is a plain workflow webhook, not SNS — it works on every compute target and needs no subscription step. See drift.

See also

Section titled “See also”
  • alerts for flags and the ECS-only guard.
  • status for the health dashboard and Golden Signals the alarms watch.
  • Going-Live Checklist for the full pre-launch notification setup.
  • ADR-0016 for why alerting is email-first with no forwarding compute.