Amazon AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate – AWS Account Management

1. Section Intro

Now we are getting into the AWS account management section and in this section we’ll see all there is to know about health dashboards, AWS organizations and the billing console. There’s no fancy diagram for these services, but they are asked at the exam for the sysups perspective. And also as sysups in the real life, you will need to know in and out these skills to be able to be a great sysups. I’m really excited. This will be a short section, but I’m sure it will be full of learning. Let’s get started.

2. AWS Status Health Dashboard

Okay, so first let’s talk about the service health dashboards. And this is a dashboard that affects all regions and all services health and show you the historical health of all the services in ALS for each day. So the cool thing is that there is an RSS feed you can subscribe to, and it is a public page you can access at this URL. So as we can see with the service health dashboard, we’re able to see whether or not there are events regarding the service health of subsidies. For example, if you wanted to know if Athena in Northern Virginia was down, you would look at this line right here, and as you can see, it is not down. The service is operating normally. So there is an RSS feed.

So you can click on this. And what this gives you is a file, and it allows you to track the feed of the service, the health of the service over time and receive notifications for it. Okay? So all the services of AOS are in this space. As you can see, it’s a really, really, really big page. And then at the bottom, you also get the status history, so you can see the history of all these services. So you can have a look and go back in time to see whether or not a service is reliable or not in a specific region. Could it be North America, Europe and so on. So what this page gives you is an RSS feed. Okay? And this applies to all the services at a high level. But, but to know how this affects you, as we’ll see in the next lecture, we have to use the personal health dashboard. So hope you liked it, and I will see you in the next lecture.

3. AWS Personal Health Dashboard

If you wanted to know how events in alias affects your services and your resources, then you would use the Personal Health Dashboard. So this is the little bell icon you see on the top right corner of your console, and it is a global service. And it will show how outages happening within a list will directly impact you. It will show you the impact on your resources. So you can see if your EC two instances or EBS volumes have maintenance upcoming and it will list issues and actions you can do to remediate them. So the important thing to know is that it will show you all the maintenance events from AWS and this is a keyword to look for in the exam. You can also access all this information programmatically using an API called the AWS Health API.

And finally, there’s a capability if you have enabled AWS organizations to aggregate all the information from all your accounts in your organization in one place. And here is the URL in case you need it. Now let’s talk about health event notifications. So, you can use event bridge or cloud watch events to react to changes to your health events for your account. So, we have the Personal Health Dashboard that will trigger an event in cloud watch events or event Bridge, okay? For example, you may want to receive a notification whenever easy to instances in your account are scheduled for updates. In this case, you would set up this notification and then you would line it up with a target. So this cannot be used to return public events. So all the service Health Dashboard events cannot be intercepted here. They have to be using the RSS, if you remember. But with this we can enable use cases to capture notifications for our accounts. For example, sending notifications, capture event informations or take automatic corrective actions if you know how to do so using some automation. So CloudWatch events or EventBridge can invoke Lambda, SNS, SQS or cancer data streams.

And then for example, if you have lambda, you can do whatever you want with it and take some corrective action if this is something that happens a lot in your accounts. So, that’s it. Now let’s have a look at the Health Dashboard. So, what I’m going to do now is click on this bell icon. As you can see right now, there are zero open issues, schedule changes or other notifications, but I can click on event log and see what has happened in my accounts.

And so, as you can see some days, for example, June 30, there was an Athena engine version auto upgrade notification and one entity was affected, or an easy to instance recovery no action because it’s something that triggered during my recording and it affected one resource. So you can see all these kind of issues and whether or not they were closed. For example, there was an EC two operational issue right here and it gives you the region.

So USC two the category, whether or not it affected some resources and what was the description of that issue which was right here. You can also get some information around the affected resources here if you have many. So this becomes very, very, very helpful.

Then there is a dashboard, okay, and the dashboard shows you how many issues in the past seven days, schedule changes and other notifications. And as you can see, you can create a Cloud Watch event rule to create rules and receive notifications for events that might affect your infrastructure. So let’s have a look at it. So what I’m going to do is go to Cloud Watch events, but actually I’m going to go into Event bridge to show you the newer interface because they’re similar. And here we have a rule and we can create a rule and I’ll call it PhD Demo Rule. And then we have to look for an event pattern by service and the service provider is going to be AWS and the service name is going to be Health. Okay? Now we need to select an event type so we can have all events or specific health events, but we’re going to use all events. And then it shows you what a sample event can be for this. So for example, this is an elastic load balancing issue with a start date and an end date and so on.

So we can get notified of all these events right here through Cloud Watch events. And then the cool thing is that you can select targets and invoke a lambda function or send a message to an SNS topic and so on, or all really the destinations are listed right here for your health events to be intercepted. So this is one way of doing it and the other way is to query all this information using the Health API. As you can see, you can also get an organization wide view. And so the idea is that you set up organizations and then you enable organizational view for a TOS Health and you’ll be good to go. And I’m pretty lucky because I just got an issue with my PhD. So I’m trying to launch two easy two instances right now for another lecture and it turns out that they’re in pending state for a long time. And for me this looks a bit odd. So I looked at my personal Health dashboard and see that there is one open issue so I can click on it and see that there is an open issue that’s affecting me right now. So I’m pretty unlucky but pretty lucky regarding recording purpose.

And so as we can see in EU central one, there is an EC two operational issue and the event data is showing me that there is an instance connectivity issue. So there is increased error rates and the latencies for the EC two API and connectivity issues for some instances within a single AZ in the EU central region. So it doesn’t detect that my instances are affected. It’s partly because my instances are not launched just yet, but as you can see, this was shown in my pig. And so I can explain what is happening regarding my EC two instances just yet, even though I find it extremely annoying. So the only thing I have to do is to wait for this to be resolved. So hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully you understand now the usefulness of the service. I hope you like this lecture and I will see you in the next lecture.