Posted On: Oct 3, 2017
The Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Agent is now installed by default on Amazon Linux AMIs, version 2017.09 and later, and available on the Amazon Linux package repository.
Previously, the Systems Manager Agent was installed on all Windows AMIs published by Amazon. Now, the Systems Manager Agent is also installed by default on all instances launched or built from Amazon Linux AMIs. To start using Systems Manager, you just need to attach AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to the instances, no additional configuration is required. Updating or restarting the agent does not interrupt any ongoing Systems Manager operations, like Run Command, so you can do this at any time. You can also upload agent logs to Amazon CloudWatch, which allows you to diagnose the agent without logging into an instance to fetch logs.
The Systems Manager Agent is open source and available on GitHub, so you can customize the agent as needed.
Systems Manager is available in all commercial regions and GovCloud.
For more information about Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, visit our Product Page and Documentation.