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AWS Health

AWS Health gives visibility into the availability of AWS services and the health of your own resources. It is the service that tells you a degradation is AWS’s rather than yours, and warns you about maintenance before it happens.

The AWS Health Dashboard is available to every AWS customer at no additional cost and needs no setup — it is ready for any authenticated user. Every customer can also receive AWS Health events through Amazon EventBridge at no cost, which is what makes automated responses possible.

Event types

Section titled “Event types”

Account-specific events affect your resources or your account. An EC2 instance scheduled for retirement, an RDS instance due for a maintenance window, an expiring certificate: the event names the entities involved.

Public events affect an AWS service broadly and are not tied to any account — a Regional service disruption, for instance. These appear whether or not you use the affected service.

What an event carries

Section titled “What an event carries”
  • Event type code — identifies the service and the kind of event.
  • Event status — open, closed or upcoming.
  • Affected entities — the specific resources involved, for account-specific events.
  • Category — issue, scheduled change, or account notification.
  • Start and end times, and a description that is updated as the situation develops.

Getting events out of the dashboard

Section titled “Getting events out of the dashboard”

Reading the dashboard is not an operational practice. Two integrations make Health useful:

  • EventBridge delivers Health events as they happen, to any target — a Lambda function that drains an instance scheduled for retirement, a Slack or Teams notification, a ticket. Available on every support plan.
  • The AWS Health API allows querying and integration with in-house and third-party systems. This requires an AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support or AWS Unified Operations plan (or, where those plans are not yet offered, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp or Enterprise Support).

Organizational view aggregates health events across every account in an AWS organization, which is how you avoid one team learning about a Regional issue an hour after another team did.