Telegram Notification Setup for AWS SNS Message/Alarm

𝐒𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐉𝐚𝐢𝐧

3 min readApr 3, 2024

Purpose :

Need to make the SNS message or cloud watch alarm from SNS to send to telegram group or messages using telegram bot.

Services Used :

AWS SNS
AWS Lambda
Telegram Bot
Python

Workflow :

Once we create the telegram bot, we will have the token and chat ID for the bot, and telegram is given the rest API to send a message to the bot.
So in this process, we need to set up one lambda which will call the telegram bot api to send the messages which is collected from sns.
For that we need add this lambda in the sns subscription so that whenever new messages come, it will trigger the lambda.

Procedure :

1) CREATE TELEGRAM BOT :

In the Telegram app, type and search for @BotFather. Next, press the Start button (alternatively, you may send the /start command). Once this is done, send the /newbot command and follow the few easy steps to create a new Telegram bot. The BotFather will generate an authorisation token for the new bot. This token is a string which resembles something like 123456789:ABCD1234efgh5678-IJKLM. This is required for sending requests to the Telegram Bot API.
In the Telegram app, search the name of the bot that you had created. Then, press the Start button (you may also send the /start botusername command). Write down any text message to chat with your bot. For, e.g., write ‘Hello’.
Now, execute the Bot API call to retrieve the ID of your chat with the bot. In the given command, replace <token> with the value of the authorisation token that you had received from the BotFather.
curl ‘https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates’ | python -m json.tool
The output of this will give your chat id.
Please refer the following sample output of the curl ‘https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates’ | python -m json.tool
curl output of get chat id telegram

{
    "ok": true,
    "result": [
        {
            "message": {
                "chat": {
                    "first_name": "<first_name>",
                    "id": <Enter your ID>,
                    "last_name": "<last_name>",
                    "type": "private"
                },
                "date": 1661359090,
                "entities": [
                    {
                        "length": 6,
                        "offset": 0,
                        "type": "bot_command"
                    }
                ],
                "from": {
                    "first_name": "<first_name>",
                    "id": <Enter your ID>,
                    "is_bot": false,
                    "language_code": "en",
                    "last_name": "<last_name>"
                },
                "message_id": 3,
                "text": "/start"
            },
            "update_id": <Update ID>
        }
    ]
}

2) CREATE LAMBDA :

We need to create one lambda function, which will trigger from SNS on publishing a message.
When the lambda is triggered, it collects the message from SNS and call the telegram bot API to send a message to particular group.
Need to have the chatbot id and API token of the telegram bot which we collected from STEP 1.
Please refer the following sample lambda code :