AWS Health's Migration to AWS Managed Notifications: Understanding the Big Picture

What Are AWS Managed Notifications?

AWS managed notifications is a centralized notification feature that handles default notifications from AWS services. These are notifications that AWS services generate automatically, such as:

• Health operations - Account-specific Scheduled Change and Account Notification events
• Security alerts - Findings from services like SecurityHub, required policy changes and protocol updates
• Account-specific issues - A new option to receive notifications for current, ongoing service events which may affect availability of your services
• Billing notifications - Cost and Usage data and service availability, and payments issues affecting your accounts

Currently, only AWS Health is integrated with AWS managed notifications.

Key Benefits of AWS Managed Notifications

Managed notifications provides an enhanced experience over the legacy event notifications you receive today. With features to reduce the overall volume of notifications, opt in and out of specific notification types, and deliver notifications to more than just email, you can distribute information efficiently, using the preferred tools used by your individual teams or recipients.

1. Unified Notification Experience

• Single location for all AWS service notifications
• Consistent format across different notification types
• Integrated with the AWS Console Notification Center
• Centralized subscription management
• Fine-grained control over notification preferences

2. Flexible Delivery Options

• Console Notifications Center
• Improved email formatting
• Easy routing to the desired channel
• Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications via Amazon Q Developer
• AWS Console Mobile App push notifications
• API access for programmatic handling

3. Smart Organization Features

• Organization-wide visibility of AWS Health events in management accounts
• Intelligent bundling of related notifications
• Deduplication of notifications for shared account contacts (root and alternate contacts)

The Migration to AWS Managed Notifications

AWS Health events notifications will be transitioning to be sent through the AWS User Notifications service and benefit from its available features.

Timeline

• Until September 14, 2025: Opt-in period to use AWS managed notifications
• September 15, 2025: AWS managed notifications are enabled for all existing AWS accounts. For new AWS accounts, managed notifications are enabled by default. You can enable and disable managed notifications until December 15th, 2025
• December 15, 2025: AWS managed notifications are enabled for all accounts, and you can no longer disable them

IMPORTANT: When AWS managed notifications are enabled, you'll receive AWS Health notifications from a new email address health@aws.com instead of no-reply-aws@amazon.com.

Why Start Now?

Early adoption of AWS managed notifications provides several advantages:

• Time to familiarize your team with the new system
• Opportunity to update automation and email rules at your own pace
• Ability to test and optimize your notification workflow
• Option to roll back if needed during testing
• Reduced pressure compared to waiting for automatic enrollment

Getting Started

1. Enable AWS Managed Notifications

REMEMBER: on September 15, 2025 AWS will auto enable managed notifications in your account(s).

Enabling managed notifications gives you a centralized view of important updates about your AWS environment, making it easier to track and respond to service updates and health events.

1. Access AWS Management Console
2. Open Console Notifications Center
3. Navigate to AWS managed notifications subscriptions
4. Enable AWS Health Notifications
5. Repeat across your accounts

Once enabled, new AWS Health notifications will appear in the Console Notification Center. Learn more about enabling and disabling managed notifications.

2. Set Up AWS Organizations Integration (Recommended for Organizations users)

Enabling trusted access allows User Notifications to aggregate the events in your AWS organization and reduce duplicate email notifications. Before this AWS Organizations integration, an event affecting multiple accounts in your organization resulted in separate email notifications for each account (even when the email address is the same).

With trusted access enabled:

• Events from all member accounts are aggregated in the management account by your Organization's ID
• Duplicate email notifications are eliminated when the same email address is used in both management and member accounts (both the management and member accounts will need to enable managed notifications to benefit from this).
• User Notifications will treat email@example.com and email+1@example.com as the same email address to further reduce duplications.

If you use AWS Organizations:

1. Sign in to Organizations management account
2. Enable trusted access to unlock organization-wide visibility
3. If enabling before Sept 15 2025, make sure each member account is also enabled to benefit from deduplication of emails.

Learn more about enabling trusted access to AWS Organizations and aggregating and deduplicating AWS managed notifications.

3. Manage Your Notification Experience

• Review your notification categories
• Manage account contact subscriptions
• Add delivery channels
• Update email rules for health@aws.com in your preferred email client

Learn more about managing your managed notifications subscriptions.

Additional Resources

• AWS User Notifications documentation
• AWS Organizations integration guide
• AWS managed notifications demo
• Understanding aggregation and deduplication

Conclusion

The introduction of AWS managed notifications and the migration of AWS Health notifications represents a significant improvement in how AWS delivers service notifications. While the transition becomes mandatory in December 2025, organizations can benefit from early adoption to ensure a smooth transition and take advantage of the enhanced features sooner.

Stay informed about updates and best practices by regularly consulting AWS documentation and engaging with AWS Support as needed.