Learn how to check your Amazon AWS service status, with tools like the Health Dashboard. This blog also teaches you how to handle cloud outages.
Are your applications on AWS? If so, have you ever wondered how you can get a bird’s-eye view of your instances’ performance health?
Understanding the status of your AWS applications is crucial. After all, you need to make sure your AMIs are rock solid. Less than 20% of companies actually have the data necessary to understand how their cloud operations run.
The good news is that AWS provides a comprehensive tool called AWS Health to help you monitor the health of AWS services and identify potential disruptions. This guide will walk you through checking your AWS service status and the key features of AWS Health, as well as provide best practices for managing the stability of your instances.
To begin with, let’s take a look at navigating the dashboard so that you can save some time in case an incident actually occurs.
You can access all information about the health of your instances and AWS service status through the AWS Health Dashboard. You can find this through the AWS Management Console. From there, using the Health Dashboard is pretty straightforward and involves the following:
The Health Dashboard provides a centralized view of the health of AWS services. It displays information on:
Account Events are events related directly to your account. AWS Health allows you to check any events that may have occurred in the last 90 days.
The Account Events section also allows you to filter events by status, such as open, recent, and scheduled changes, to easily identify and prioritize events that require your attention.
Similar to account events, AWS Health lets you get an overview of any AWS service status running within the entire organization. This is especially useful when you have collaborative services that might be running from other accounts.
Similar to Account Events, you can filter Organization Events by status to focus on the most relevant information. You can also access notifications and event logs for Organization Events for the past 90 days to gain insights into the health of your organization’s AWS environment.
The Service Health section gives you an overview of all the AWS services currently running, and whether any have disruptions.
The Health Dashboard provides clear indicators of service availability status, such as:
To check service health status, go to your Health Dashboard and click “Service Health.” AWS will display the status of all services currently running, along with the name of any disruption event and the region in which it occurred.
When service disruptions occur, the Health Dashboard provides:
What if you wanted your own insights without cluttering the monitor with too many event alerts and notifications? There’s a way to do that too.
AWS Health gives you the option to take control of your monitoring experience by tailoring it to your specific needs and preferences. Specifically, you can do the following:
Suppose you want far greater access to event alerts and downtime alerts. The AWS Health API allows you to access more direct and tweakable information about events that may affect your AWS resources. It is a RESTful API, which means you have the ability to send and receive API requests and responses more efficiently.
By integrating this API with other services, you can automate responses to events, improve monitoring, and enhance communication within your organization.
Also read: Maximize Cloud Efficiency: Complete Guide to Well-Architected Reviews
AWS Health is a valuable tool for monitoring the health of your AWS services and proactively managing potential disruptions. With the help of the tools we’ve discussed in the sections above, you can effectively monitor the health of your AWS services and ensure that your applications rarely fail, if ever.
But suppose you don’t want to skim through the finer details yourself. Suppose you want comprehensive monitoring and observability, which are also easy to understand and take action on. SquareOps comes with years of experience in cloud monitoring, allowing you to find and flag alerts faster than the competition. What’s more, we’re an AWS partner with over 20+ certifications.
If you’d like to see our team in action, all you have to do is get in touch. To start a better cloud journey with SquareOps, click here.
AWS Health is a service provided by AWS to monitor your AWS services and identify potential disruptions affecting your applications.
You can access it through the AWS Management Console, providing a centralized view of service health.
It shows service availability, ongoing service issues, scheduled maintenance, and account/organization-specific events.
Account Events are specific to your AWS account, while Organization Events cover the entire organization’s AWS services.
It uses clear indicators like “Healthy,” “Degraded Performance,” and “Service Disruption.”
Yes, you can set up filters for relevant events and personalize notifications and alerts.
It allows for more direct access to event information, enabling automated responses and improved monitoring.
SquareOps offers you comprehensive cloud monitoring and observability expertise, allowing for faster alert flagging and action.