# Disabled Retry Policies in EventBridge

Canonical: https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/disabled-retry-policies-in-eventbridge

[Cloud Efficiency Hub](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) 

# Disabled Retry Policies in EventBridge

## Explanation

By default, EventBridge includes retry mechanisms for delivery failures, particularly when targets like Lambda functions or Step Functions fail to process an event. However, if these retry policies are disabled or misconfigured, EventBridge may treat failed deliveries as successful, prompting upstream services to republish the same event multiple times in response to undelivered outcomes. This leads to: \* Duplicate event publishing and delivery \* Unnecessary compute triggered by repeated events \* Increased EventBridge, downstream service, and data transfer costs This behavior is especially problematic in systems where idempotency is not strictly enforced and retries are managed externally by upstream services.

## Relevant Billing Model

EventBridge charges are based on the number of events published to an event bus, including retries or duplicate events. Each event published - whether successful or redundant - incurs cost.

## Detection

- Review whether retry policies are explicitly disabled on EventBridge rules

- Check event bus logs or metrics for repeated identical events over short intervals

- Identify downstream targets receiving multiple identical invocations for the same source event

- Assess whether upstream services are implementing manual retry logic due to undelivered events

- Evaluate whether duplicate events align with downstream failures or outages

## Remediation

- Enable built-in retry policies on EventBridge rules to reduce reliance on external retry logic

- Confirm downstream targets are configured with error handling (e.g., DLQs, retry settings)

- Audit event patterns for high duplication rates and correlate with retry settings

- Consider using EventBridge archive and replay for reliable reprocessing when retries are disabled

## Relevant Documentation

[Amazon EventBridge Quotas and Limits](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-quota.html) 
[EventBridge Event Retry Policy](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eventbridge-event-delivery-retries.html) 
[Best Practices for EventBridge](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-best-practices.html)

[Submit Feedback](https://hub.pointfive.co/inefficiencies/disabled-retry-policies-in-eventbridge)

## At a glance

Reference

CER-0170

Cloud provider

AWS

Service

AWS EventBridge

Category

[Other](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/other)

Inefficiency type

Misconfiguration

## Contributed by

- Jarred Clore 

### Jarred Clore

Cloud FinOps Delivery Leader @ Cisco

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarred-clore/)

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