How to Configure Alerts in AWS Opensearch Serverless

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If you’re using Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, you might notice that it doesn’t include the built-in alerting feature that’s available with Amazon OpenSearch Service managed clusters. This means you won’t find the usual dashboard alerts directly in your serverless environment.

But don’t worry—there’s a good way to keep an eye on your collections and get notified about important events. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your OpenSearch Serverless collections and set up alerts. Here’s how you can do it:

First, identify the key metrics that matter for your setup, such as IndexingOCU, SearchOCU, IngestionRequestLatency, SearchRequestLatency, IngestionRequestErrors, and SearchRequestErrors. These metrics give you a clear picture of how your system is performing.

Next, create CloudWatch alarms for these metrics with your preferred thresholds. For example, you might set an alarm to trigger if the error rate exceeds a certain point or if latency gets too high.

Once your alarms are in place, you can set up notifications through Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service). This way, whenever an alarm is triggered, you’ll receive an email, SMS, or other notification to alert you immediately about potential issues.

You can also build custom dashboards within CloudWatch to view multiple metrics and alarms all in one place. This helps you keep a close watch on your environment’s health from a single, easy-to-access screen.

This setup allows you to proactively monitor your OpenSearch Serverless environment and respond quickly to any problems. You can configure these alerts either through the AWS Management Console, using the AWS CLI, or with CloudFormation templates—whichever method suits your workflow best.

While it’s different from the native alerting built into managed clusters, using CloudWatch provides a reliable way to monitor and get notifications about your serverless collections.

For more detailed instructions, you might want to check out the AWS documentation or the dedicated blog post on monitoring Amazon OpenSearch Serverless with CloudWatch.