AWS Health Cheat Sheet

AWS Health provides ongoing visibility into the state of your AWS resources, services, and accounts. It is the authoritative source for events and changes that might affect your AWS environment, offering a personalized view that is distinct from the public AWS Service Health Dashboard.

Core Concepts

AWS Health vs. Service Health Dashboard

• AWS Health Dashboard: This is your personalized dashboard, accessible after you authenticate into the AWS Management Console. It shows events and notifications that are specific to your account and the resources you are using.

• AWS Service Health Dashboard: This is the public-facing website (status.aws.amazon.com) that shows the general status of all AWS services in all regions. It does not provide account-specific information.

The AWS Health Dashboard

• Provides alerts and notifications triggered by changes in the health of AWS resources.

• Requires no setup and is ready to use for any authenticated AWS user.

• The dashboard organizes events into three main categories:

  • Open and recent issues: Displays operational issues whose start time is within the last seven days. This helps you see current or very recent problems affecting AWS services.

  • Scheduled changes: Shows upcoming or ongoing events that you should be aware of, such as planned maintenance for EC2, RDS, or other services. This allows you to plan accordingly.

  • Other notifications: Provides account-related notifications and other information relevant to your account that fall outside the first two categories.

Key Features

Proactive Notifications

AWS Health gives you advance notice of scheduled activities such as hardware maintenance or software updates that might impact your resources. This allows you to plan, prepare, and avoid unexpected downtime.

Organizational View

• If you use AWS Organizations, you can enable the Organizational View for AWS Health.

• This feature aggregates all health events from every account within your organization into a single, centralized dashboard.

• It provides a comprehensive overview of the health of your entire AWS estate, which is critical for central IT and operations teams.

Automation with Amazon EventBridge

• AWS Health is deeply integrated with Amazon EventBridge.

• Every AWS Health event is automatically sent to the EventBridge bus.

• You can create EventBridge rules to detect specific health events and trigger automated actions in response. This is a powerful tool for building resilient, self-healing applications.

• Example Use Cases for Automation:

  • Trigger an AWS Lambda function to perform a custom action.

  • Send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic to alert an operations team.

  • Use AWS Systems Manager to automate operational tasks, such as patching or updating instances.

  • Stop or restart an EC2 instance in response to a degradation event.

Pricing

• AWS Health is available to all AWS customers at no additional charge.