Troubleshoot Amazon WorkSpaces Personal issues faster with WorkSpaces Advisor

When end users reports that their Amazon WorkSpace is slow or unable to connect, what happens next? Administrators work through various diagnostic tools, analyzing Amazon CloudWatch metrics, reviewing logs, and correlating signals across multiple sources to identify the root cause. While manageable at small scale, this approach does not scale across hundreds or thousands of WorkSpaces leading to increased time to resolution and frequent escalation to AWS support. This cycle consumes resources and distracts administrators from more strategic tasks.

Amazon WorkSpaces Advisor is an agentic AI-powered approach to remediation by continuously analyzing telemetry, logs, and configuration data across your environment. Rather than manually investigating, administrators can initiate an automated investigation directly from the console. This enables rapid issue resolution—often within minutes—reducing operational overhead, minimizing downtime, and improving end-user experience at scale.

This blog demonstrates how to use WorkSpaces Advisor to investigate a WorkSpace experiencing performance issues and resolve the problem in a few clicks.

Overview of the Solution

When an investigation is initiated, WorkSpaces Advisor analyzes telemetry from the past few days for the selected WorkSpace. It correlates these signals to identify likely root causes and surfaces prioritized findings, each accompanied by recommended remediation actions aligned with AWS best practices. Administrators can review the results, evaluate impact, and take corrective action directly within the console, significantly reducing investigation time and operational complexity.

In scenarios where additional context is required or no definitive issue is identified, administrators can engage directly with WorkSpaces Advisor via AWS Console chat or generate a support case pre-populated with the full investigative context, ensuring faster escalation and resolution.

Prerequisites

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

An AWS account
At least one WorkSpaces Personal resource
Your IAM role must have read permissions for WorkSpaces Advisor to initiate investigations and retrieve recommendations. These include workspaces:InvokeTroubleshootingInvestigation, workspaces:GetTroubleshootingRecommendation, and workspaces:ListTroubleshootingRecommendations.
Your IAM role must have read permissions for WorkSpaces and Amazon CloudWatch APIs, such as workspaces:DescribeWorkSpaces and cloudwatch:GetMetricData. If your role is missing permissions for specific checks, WorkSpaces Advisor skips those checks and displays a message so you can update your permissions.
Your IAM role must have permission to perform the specific action (for example, workspaces:RebootWorkspaces or workspaces:ModifyWorkspaceProperties). If your role does not have the required permission, WorkSpaces Advisor returns an error.

Refer to the WorkSpaces documentation for more information on the required permissions.

Walkthrough

In this blog, we will simulate two types of issues that your WorkSpace might experience. We will show you how you can use WorkSpaces Advisor to investigate each issue:

End user reported that their WorkSpace has suddenly become very slow.
End user reported that they are unable to log in to their WorkSpace via their web browser.

The investigation process will be the same for other issues that you may experience that are not outlined here.

Issue 1: Slow WorkSpace

In this example, an end user reported that their WorkSpace has suddenly become very slow. The administrator then performs the following steps.

Step 1: Initiate an investigation

Open the Amazon WorkSpaces console.

In the navigation pane, choose WorkSpaces, then Personal.
Select the affected WorkSpace and choose Investigate.

WorkSpaces Advisor begins a comprehensive review of the WorkSpace, analyzing telemetry and logs from the past week.

Figure 1: WorkSpaces Console main page

WorkSpaces Advisor Console Analysying WorkSpaces

Figure 2: WorkSpaces Advisor investigating the selected resource

Step 2: Review identified issues

After the scan completes, WorkSpaces Advisor displays a list of issues it has identified. For each issue, you can choose View details to see supporting data, including CloudWatch metric graphs and a description of the findings. WorkSpaces Advisor provides at least one recommended action for each issue, along with alternative actions.

Figure 3: List of insights from WorkSpaces Advisor

In our case, WorkSpaces Advisor successfully detected that the selected WorkSpace experienced slow performance due to high CPU utilization. By selecting View details in the issue card for “high CPU utilization”, we can see that WorkSpaces Advisor was able to determine the cause of the high CPU utilization and provide a recommended action as well as 2 alternative actions.

Detailed insight from WorkSpaces Advisor

Figure 4: Review recommended actions

Step 3: Take the recommended action

The recommended action provides a series of steps to be taken in order to validate the root cause and resolve. You can copy the recommended actions by selecting Copy to clipboard and send to the user or perform the steps yourself.

Figure 5: Recommended action in detail

If you have questions about the findings or recommendations, you can ask via the Chat with WorkSpaces Advisor – the chat session includes the full context of the issue. Alternatively, you can choose Create support case to contact AWS Support with the investigation context pre-populated.

You can verify the issue is resolved by performing the same actions on the WorkSpaces as described previously.

Step 4: Verify the issue is resolved

You can verify the issue has been resolved either directly in the WorkSpace or by using the WorkSpaces Advisor.

Figure 6: Verify issue is resolved