Posted On: Apr 11, 2023

Starting today, EC2 Serial Console is now generally available on EC2 bare metal instances in addition to Nitro virtual instances. EC2 Serial Console provides a simple and secure way to troubleshoot boot and network connectivity issues interactively, by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance.

Previously, on bare metal instances, you could get serial console output as logs or a screenshot through the EC2 management console, API or the CLI. With the EC2 Serial Console feature, you can interactively run troubleshooting commands for resolving boot and network configuration issues. EC2 Serial Console is ideal for situations where you are unable to connect to your instance via normal SSH or RDP. Access to EC2 Serial Console is not permitted by default at the account level, and customers can grant access to EC2 Serial console on their account by turning on the “EC2 Serial Console” account attribute from the AWS CLI or Console. It is also integrated with IAM and AWS for Organizations policies for fine grained access control.

EC2 Serial Console is available at no additional cost. Visit our documentation page to learn more about EC2 Serial Console and regions where it is available on bare metal. You can also learn from this blog post how to use the EC2 Serial console to access the GRUB menu and recover from boot failures.