AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Tag: EC2 Systems Manager Automation

Setup memory metrics for Amazon EC2 instances using AWS Systems Manager

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) emits several metrics for your EC2 instance to Amazon CloudWatch. However, memory metrics isn’t one of the default metrics provided by Amazon EC2. Several memory heavy applications like Big Data Analytics, In-memory Databases, Real-time Streaming require you to monitor memory utilization on the instances for operational visibility. These applications […]

How to fix SSH issues on EC2 Linux instances using AWS Systems Manager

In a previous blog post, we provided a walkthrough of how to fix unreachable Amazon EC2 Windows instances using the EC2Rescue for Windows tool. In this blog post, I will walk you through how to utilize EC2Rescue for Linux to fix unreachable Linux instances. This Knowledge Center Article describes how EC2Rescue for Linux can be used to […]

Using State Manager over cfn-init in CloudFormation and its benefits

Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]

Controlling your AWS costs by deleting unused Amazon EBS volumes

Customers across industries and verticals consider cost management as one of their top priorities. Limited visibility into a volume’s lifecycle can result in costs for unutilized resources. AWS builds cost-management products to access, organize, understand, control, and optimize costs on AWS. Unused and overlooked Amazon EBS volumes contribute to AWS costs. The lifecycle of EBS […]

Smart RDP and SSH remediation with AWS Systems Manager Automation API actions

Here in AWS Support, I often help customers regain RDP or SSH access to their instances. It’s a common problem, but the identification of a correct solution could take some time, even hours or days if the right information isn’t available. Even with the most up-to-date playbook, it is easy to miss simple checks that […]

Onica demonstrates uses for new AWS Systems Manager Automation actions

AWS Partner Guest Post By Eric Miller, VP of Solutions Development for Onica, a Premier Tier APN Consulting Partner As an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, Onica helps our customers across a wide variety of challenging automation problems. One very important suite of tools in our AWS toolbox is AWS Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager simplifies […]

Password Rotation for Windows on Amazon EC2 Made Easy with EC2Rescue

EC2Rescue for Windows is an easy-to-use tool that you run on an Amazon EC2 Windows Server instance to diagnose and troubleshoot possible problems. A common use of the tool is to reset the local administrator password. Password rotation is an important security task in any organization. In addition, setting strong passwords is necessary to ensure […]

Recover your impaired instances using EC2Rescue and Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation

Have you ever had an issue connecting to your Amazon EC2 Windows instance? This can be caused by any number of different reasons, but is almost always related to how the instance is configured. Unfortunately, if you can’t connect to it, you can’t fix it! Earlier this year, AWS announced EC2Rescue for Windows, a convenient, […]