New – Manage Planned Lifecycle Events on AWS Health

We are announcing new features in AWS Health to help you manage planned lifecycle events for your AWS resources and dynamically track the completion of actions that your team takes at the resource-level to ensure continued smooth operations of your applications. Some examples of planned lifecycle events are an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Kubernetes version end of standard support, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) certificate rotations, and end of support for other open source software, to name a few.

These features include:

• The ability to dynamically track the completion of actions at the resource level where possible, to minimize disruption to applications.
• Timely visibility into upcoming planned lifecycle events, using notifications at least 90 days in advance for minor changes, and 180 days in advance for major changes, whenever possible.
• A standardized data format that helps you prepare and take actions. It integrates AWS Health events programmatically with your preferred operational tools, using AWS Health API.
• An organization-wide visibility into planned lifecycle events for teams that manage workloads across the company with delegated administrator. This means that central teams such as Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) teams, no longer need to use the management account to access the organizational view.
• A single feed of AWS Health events from all accounts in your organization on Amazon EventBridge. This provides a centralized way to automate the management of AWS Health events across your organization by creating rules on EventBridge to take actions. Depending on the type of event, you can capture event information, initiate additional events, send notifications, take corrective action, or perform other actions. For example, you can use AWS Health to receive email, AWS Chatbot, or push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile Application if you have AWS resources in your AWS account that are scheduled for updates, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

How it Works
Planned lifecycle events are available through the AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Health API, and EventBridge. You can automate the management of AWS Health events across your organization by creating rules on EventBridge that includes the “source”: [“aws.health”] value to receive AWS Health notifications or initiate actions based on the rules created. For example, if AWS Health publishes an event about your EC2 instances, then you can use these notifications to take action and update or replace your resources as needed. You can view the planned lifecycle events for your AWS resources in the Scheduled changes tab.

Table View – Organizational level

To prioritize events, you can now see scheduled changes in a calendar view. The event has a start time to indicate when the change commences. The status remains as Upcoming until the change occurs or all of the affected resources have been actioned. The event status changes to Completed when all of the affected resources have been actioned. You can also deselect event statuses that you don’t want to focus on. To show more specific event details, select an event to open the split panel view to the right or the bottom of the screen.

Calendar event selected – Organizational level (Affected resources)

When selecting the Affected resources tab on the detailed view of an event, customers can see relevant account information that can help you reach out to the right people to resolve impaired resources.

Affected resources view – Account level

Integration with Other AWS Services
Using EventBridge integrations that already exist in AWS Health, you can send change events, and their fully managed lifecycles to other tools such as JIRA, ServiceNow, and AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. EventBridge sends all updates to events (for example, timestamps, resource status, and more) to these tools, allowing you to track the status of events in your preferred tooling.

EventBridge integrations

Now Available
Planned lifecycle events for AWS Health are available in all AWS Regions where AWS Health is available except China and GovCloud Regions.
To learn more, visit the AWS Health user guide. You can submit your questions to AWS re:Post for AWS Health, or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Veliswa