Some background:

I previously wrote a python lambda function that copies AWS RDS snapshots to a different region. This has been working for months but recently started throwing this obfuscated error:

Thinking this might be due to some timestamp shenanigans, I looked at the Cloudwatch Events trigger for the lambda and saw that there were two triggers instead of the original one that I setup. Both were scheduled for the same time. I deleted the new one and waited until the next day to see if the error re-occurred, which it did.

Looking through the Cloudwatch errors, even though the second trigger was gone, the lambda was still trying to execute twice. I’ve filed a support ticket with AWS, but in the meantime, needed to silence the false positives to keep people from getting paged.

The error handling had been done as:

except botocore.exceptions.ClientError as e: raise Exception("Could not issue copy command: %s" % e)

Initially, I tried:

except botocore.exceptions.ClientError as e:
   if 'DBSnapshotAlreadyExists' in e:
       pass
   else:      
       raise Exception("Could not issue copy command: %s" % e)

Instead, I had to do:

except botocore.exceptions.ClientError as e:
   if e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'DBSnapshotAlreadyExists':
       pass
   else:      
       raise Exception("Could not issue copy command: %s" % e)

Which works.