I need to create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to recover an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance in case system status checks fail. However, the "Recover this instance" option is grayed out in the Amazon EC2 console.
Resolution
If CloudWatch determines that an EC2 instance uses instance store volumes, then the option to recover the instance is grayed out and unavailable. The recover alarm action doesn't support EC2 instances that have instance store volumes.
Note: You can't recover instance store volume data, but you can back up instance store volume data.
For more information about instance store volumes, CloudWatch alarms for EC2 instances, and instance recovery, see the following documentation.
Amazon EC2 Linux instance store volumes
Instance store volumes
Block device mappings
Create alarms that stop, terminate, reboot, or recover an instance
Amazon CloudWatch action based recovery
Retrieve instance metadata
Amazon EC2 Windows instance store volumes
Instance store volumes
Block device mappings
Create alarms that stop, terminate, reboot, or recover an instance
Amazon CloudWatch action based recovery
Retrieve instance metadata
Important: Make sure that your instances meet all the prerequisites to create a CloudWatch alarm.
Related information
Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms