Amazon adds EC2 Status Check and Reporting Features

Many IT professionals think launching and maintaining a server on the Cloud is similar to flying an unmanned aircraft. That’s because you have no visibility into the boot process and access to the information that you would typically have for on-premise servers.

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Amazon Web Services addresses this issue through various mechanisms. Amazon CloudWatch is a great tool to monitor and track the health of the resources running in the Cloud. But CloudWatch is restricted to a few parameters related to the system health of a running EC2 instance. With today’s announcement, AWS makes it easy to get insights into the boot process and accurately diagnose the issues with the EC2 instances. EC2 Status Check provides two levels of diagnostics – 1) System Status Check and, 2) Instance Status Check.System status check detects the problems that require the intervention of AWS team to fix. These issues include loss of network connectivity, loss of system power, OS related issues and issues with the physical host running the instance. There could be other problems that the owner of the instance can fix. These include misconfiguration of network, incompatibility with the kernel and file system corruption. Logging on to the instance and manually fixing them can solve these issues. These problems will be reported through Instance Status Check.

AWS Management Console is already updated to surface these features. Below is a screenshot of the System Status Check.

By clicking on the Status Check tab of the instance properties, you can get more details about both the reports.

If you experience issues with the instance that are not reported by either of these checks, you can submit feedback by pinpointing to the actual issue. You can do that by clicking the Submit Feedback button that will bring the following dialog.

AWS has announced a feature that is welcomed by the customers! Sign in now into the AWS Management Console and start leveraging it.