Category: Management Tools

In this post, we describe how to set up Amazon CloudWatch Events so that you are notified when AWS OpsWorks Stacks auto healing triggers stop and start events on an Amazon EC2 instance. Recently, AWS OpsWorks Stacks announced support for CloudWatch Events. You can now send state changes in OpsWorks Stacks, such as instance stopped […]

In this blog post I’d like to share an AWS CloudFormation custom resource I’ve written that allows you to deploy StackSets from within a CloudFormation template. You can use StackSets to deploy and manage CloudFormation stacks in multiple accounts and multiple AWS Regions from a central location using a single template and set of operations.

AWS Systems Manager is a powerful unified interface from AWS that provides you with the ability to centrally manage your AWS resources. Core to leveraging AWS Systems Manager is the use of AWS Systems Manager documents. An AWS Systems Manager document (SSM document) allows you to define what actions you want Systems Manager to perform […]

Patch Manager automates the process of patching Windows and Linux managed instances. Use this feature of AWS Systems Manager to scan your instances for missing patches or scan and install missing patches. You can install patches individually or to large groups of instances by using Amazon EC2 tags. In this blog post, I show you […]

In July of 2017, we posted an entry on this blog about how to use AWS Systems Manager, Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight to gather inventory metadata from managed EC2 instances and aggregate it for the purpose of centralized reporting and visualization of the data. When determining how to report on this data, […]

Tracking and managing the states of your AWS resources can be a challenge, especially as your account grows and you integrate with more and more AWS services. AWS Config is a service that helps make tracking your resources easy by continuously monitoring and recording your AWS resource configurations and maintaining a history of configuration changes […]

Introduction To help customers integrate provisioning secure, compliant, and pre-approved AWS products into their ServiceNow service catalog/portal, AWS introduces the AWS Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow. AWS Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow synchronizes AWS Service Catalog portfolios and products with the ServiceNow Service Catalog to enable ServiceNow users to request approved AWS products via ServiceNow. In […]

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to dynamically constrain AWS Service Catalog product parameter options for AWS Service Catalog end users based on specific tag values.

AWS Systems Manager Inventory collects metadata from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises instances. AWS Systems Manager Inventory integrates with AWS Config to record inventory data for historical views, change tracking, or auditing. When you use AWS Config recording for systems inventory data you can enable scenarios such as tracking newly installed or removed software applications, […]

By Jeff Levine, AWS Solutions Architect AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all of the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. You can specify run time parameters to customize your CloudFormation template’s operation. AWS provides some AWS-specific parameters types to make things easier. For example, if you use the […]