Amazon EC2 now supports Diagnostic Interrupts
Starting today, you can send diagnostic interrupts to your Amazon EC2 instances. Diagnostic interrupts help you debug unresponsive instances and conduct root cause analysis.
Prior to today, it was challenging to debug or root cause an unresponsive instance. Now, with a simple API call, you have an out-of-band method to trigger a kernel panic (blue screen error in case of Windows operating system) for an EC2 instance. You can use this capability to direct the operating system to perform tasks like creating a crash dump, loading a secondary kernel, or obtaining a call trace. For example, you can configure your instance to generate a crash dump file when a kernel panic is triggered. Crash dumps contain snapshots of your instance's memory, providing crucial data points to help with your root cause analysis.
Diagnostic interrupts are now available in all public AWS Regions and GovCloud (US).
To learn more and get started with this feature, see the documentation.