How to Build an AWS SES Dashboard for Real-Time Logs and Monitoring
Learn how to build or deploy an AWS SES dashboard for real-time logs and monitoring. See how SendOps adds a complete email marketing layer on top of SES.
Kash Sajadi 4 min read When a customer cannot find an email, your team needs to answer three questions: did the application submit it, did Amazon SES deliver it to the receiving server, and what happened afterward?
Amazon SES offers native metrics and an optional Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) dashboard with message search. You do not have to build a custom logging stack just to investigate a message. A custom dashboard or a platform such as SendOps becomes useful when you need different retention, application context, or email workflows alongside those diagnostics.
Start with the native AWS options
SES account and CloudWatch metrics help you track sending volume and reputation. If you enable Virtual Deliverability Manager, its console dashboard adds deliverability views and a Messages table where you can search by recipient, sender, message ID, and other fields, then inspect event history and receiving-server responses.
VDM is an optional, separately priced SES feature. Check its current availability, retention, and charges against your needs. The AWS VDM dashboard documentation describes its search and reporting capabilities; the SES pricing page lists charges.
Use these tools first if your requirement is straightforward delivery troubleshooting. You may already have enough visibility without another service or an internal engineering project.
When a custom event pipeline makes sense
Build your own view when you need to join delivery events to product actions, retain selected records on your own schedule, or apply business-specific reporting rules.
A typical architecture has four parts:
- Ingestion: Configure an SES configuration set with an event destination, and ensure the relevant sends use that configuration set. Publish the events your investigation needs, such as sends, deliveries, bounces, complaints, and rendering failures.
- Processing: Use a consumer to normalize records and deduplicate repeated deliveries. Preserve the SES message ID, recipient, event timestamp, classification, and diagnostic response.
- Storage: Choose a database or log store based on your queries, volume, retention, and access requirements. Decide whether you need only metadata or additional message context.
- Presentation: Give operators a recipient or message-ID search, a chronological event view, and a link back to the application action that initiated the send.
AWS documents the available integrations in its event publishing guide. SNS notifications, EventBridge, and Firehose support different integration patterns; choose a route that fits your existing systems.
Before relying on the dashboard, test a successful delivery and a controlled failure. Confirm that the events arrive and that a support operator can follow one message from submission to its final known status.
Define the metrics before building charts
A useful dashboard distinguishes between related but different facts:
- Accepted by SES: Your request was accepted for processing. That does not guarantee delivery.
- Delivered to the receiving server: The receiving server accepted the message. That does not prove inbox placement or that a person read it.
- Raw failure events: These explain what happened to individual messages. They are not interchangeable with AWS reputation metrics.
- Engagement signals: Opens and clicks can inform analysis, but automated scanning and privacy features can affect them. Use product activity when measuring activation or conversion.
Track AWS reputation metrics explicitly and label any custom ratios with their calculation and time window. The SES reputation monitoring guide is the starting point for account-health monitoring.
Choose the scope your team needs
| Requirement | A reasonable starting point |
|---|---|
| Account metrics and delivery troubleshooting in AWS | SES metrics and, where needed, VDM. |
| Custom retention or joins with internal business data | An SES event pipeline and your existing reporting tools. |
| Delivery investigation alongside contacts, segments, broadcasts, and drips | Evaluate SendOps or another platform against those workflows. |
Compare the full cost of each option: service charges, retention, implementation, and ongoing maintenance. Managed email products have different pricing models and migration requirements; do not assume every provider charges per contact or that moving to one transfers ownership of your domain.
Monitoring and workflows with SendOps
SendOps connects to your AWS account and sends through your SES resources. It holds contacts, consent, events, and campaign content, and brings message reporting together with audience management and email automation.
Your team can investigate delivery history, build SendQL segments, and run broadcasts or multi-step drip workflows in the same workspace. Event ingestion is near real time; report views refresh when loaded, so refresh a view when checking for a newly arrived event. Searchable history depends on your plan’s retention.
If you already send directly through SES, check that the configuration sets carrying that traffic publish events to SendOps. A connected account alone does not make every existing sending path observable.
Start with our SES monitoring guide to define the signals you need. If your next requirement is acting on customer behavior, follow the drip workflow tutorial and compare the current SendOps plans.