Today, the alert policy only allows email addresses. To automate a response to an alert, you have to bounce an email off a mail gateway or similar (I used free Cloudwatch) and call a webhook suited to consume the alert. You are in charge of parsing at the gateway and again at the webhook.

Alerts should allow notifications to webhook addresses, like our impressions and audit trail webhooks. Specify the host and address of the webhook and, this is critical, provide a button to test it. That button alone could save hours of testing and frustration.

With a native alert webhook, Cloudwatch and similar are no longer required, collapsing many days of development time to a few hours, and fulfilling our promise of custom, automated responses to alerts.