New CloudWatch Action Helps You Automate System Health Recovery for EC2

Posted on: Jul 23, 2015

Amazon CloudWatch collects monitoring data for your AWS resources and applications and generates alarms based on configured thresholds. CloudWatch actions enable you to automate tasks that respond to CloudWatch alarms, helping you trigger corrective operations faster and use engineering resources more efficiently.

Previously, you could choose an action to stop or terminate an instance on an alarm, or automatically recover instances onto new hardware if an issue occurs. Now, you have an additional option to select an action to automatically reboot an EC2 instance in response to an application failure alarm or as part of a scheduled maintenance program. The reboot instance action reboots the instance on the same physical host, so the instance retains its public DNS name, private IP address, and any data stored locally. Previously, this action would have required manual user intervention or the development of custom scripts.

CloudWatch actions are free to use. You can get started by logging in to the EC2 section of the AWS Management Console and attaching a CloudWatch alarm and an EC2 reboot action to an instance. To learn more, please see our documentation.