AWS Health Dashboard

The AWS Health Dashboard provides crucial insights and real-time information about AWS service availability and performance, enabling users to better monitor and manage our cloud infrastructure.

We additionally can also use the AWS Health API to programmatically access the same health information shown in the AWS Health Dashboard.

Integration with EventBridge

We can integrate the AWS Health Dashboard with the AWS EventBridge service. We do so by setting up EventBridge rules that are based on AWS Health events from the AWS Health Dashboard.

Here’s one setup where we set up automated email notifications to admin users about any new AWS Health event.

In this workflow, we set up an EventBridge rule that monitors health events. Whenever a health event is encountered, EventBridge triggers a Lambda function with an email notification about the event sent to admin users via AWS SNS.

AWS Health Dashboard views

Here are some of the views that are available on the AWS Health Dashboard:

• Service health: This public view shows the general status of AWS services that affect AWS as a whole. It informs us about service disruptions, outages, and any maintenance activities that might affect the availability of AWS services. Unlike other AWS Health Dashboard views, we don’t need to be logged in to the AWS Management Console to view it. You can check out this view on the following AWS Management Console link without having to sign into it.

• Your account health: This personal account view provides a tailored view of the performance and availability of the infrastructure resources used by an individual AWS account. It offers alerts and remediation guidance specific to the user’s resources and services.

• Your organization health: This organizational view provides a single aggregated view of health events across all AWS accounts in the AWS Organization.

AWS Heath events

AWS Heath events are the events that AWS Health informs us of other AWS services. These events can be about scheduled changes in AWS services or issues that might affect the performance of our AWS account. AWS Heath events can be of two types:

• Account-specific events: These are health events that affect our AWS account or organization. An example of such an event can be a notification about AWS access credentials getting compromised on a public code repository.

• Public events: These are health events that affect an AWS service as a whole for the public and not just specific to an AWS account or organization. For example, if there’s a service issue with the EC2 service in the us-east-1 region, then that’s a public event, as it will affect EC2 operations in the us-east-1 region across all AWS accounts and AWS organizations.

Breakdown of AWS Health events

Here’s a breakdown of what AWS Heath events entail:

• Event type code: This component acts as a unique identifier for the health event occurring within AWS comprised of the affected service and event type. This includes the affected service and the type of event. For example, a Health event with the AWS_EC2_SYSTEM_MAINTENANCE_EVENT event type code means the event relates to the AWS EC2, which might be affected by a maintenance event scheduled for the service.

• Event type categories: This component corresponds to the category of the event. AWS Health events are classified into the following broader groups:

  • Account notification: This category includes events that are specific to an individual AWS account. These could be notifications about resource configurations, security recommendations, or other account-level advisories. An example of such an event can be the expiration of an IAM user’s access key credentials.

  • Issue: Events under this category represent problems or disruptions impacting AWS services. Issues might include service outages, performance degradations, or other operational problems. An example of such an event can be an unexpected operational issue in the EC2 service.

  • Scheduled change: These events involve planned changes or maintenance activities in AWS services. Scheduled changes are communicated in advance to allow users to prepare and mitigate any potential impact on their services. An example of such an event can be a scheduled end-of-support life cycle event for one of the older RDS instance versions that need to be changed before the planned date.

• Event status: Event status indicates the current state of an AWS Health event. Here are some health event statuses we might notice on the AWS Health Dashboard:

  • Open: This status indicates that the issue is still ongoing or the scheduled event has not yet occurred

  • Closed: This status indicates that the issue has been resolved or the scheduled event has passed

  • Upcoming: This status indicates that the event is planned for the future.

• Affected entities: This term refers to the specific AWS resources impacted by the event.

Use cases

Here are some use cases of the AWS Health Dashboard:

• The AWS Health Dashboard is responsible for proactively informing us of any events that affect our resources and suggesting actions to mitigate the issue.

• The AWS Health Dashboard informs us of any upcoming planned life cycle events and tracks our team’s steps at the resource level.

• The AWS Health Dashboard monitors and tracks AWS Health events across AWS accounts at scale.

• The AWS Health Dashboard can help us troubleshoot incidents by informing us where the issue occurs at the resource level.

• The AWS Health service can be integrated with Amazon EventBridge, or we can use the AWS Health API to automate responses to specific AWS Health events.

This lesson taught us about AWS Health Dashboard and how it helps us monitor the health of AWS services and our AWS accounts.