AWS Health and Personal Health Dashboards

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What is AWS Health?

• Visibility into service incidents, scheduled changes, and account-level notifications.
• Timelines and affected-resource context to help prioritize response.
• Integration with Amazon EventBridge for automated routing to remediation pipelines (for example: Lambda, Step Functions, SNS).

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Service Health Dashboard vs Personal Health Dashboard

• Service Health Dashboard (public): https://status.aws.amazon.com — global, service-level status visible to anyone.
• Personal Health Dashboard (account-specific): requires AWS sign-in; surfaces issues and scheduled changes that affect your account and resources.

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Event types and retention

• Service events (incidents, outages)
• Scheduled changes (e.g., instance retirement, maintenance windows)
• Account notifications (quotas, limits, billing-impacting events)
• Announcements (product updates, feature rollouts)

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Example event structure

{
  "eventTypeCode": "AWS_EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED",
  "eventTypeCategory": "scheduledChange",
  "service": "EC2",
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "startTime": "2024-03-15T10:00:00Z",
  "endTime": "2024-03-15T12:00:00Z",
  "affectedEntities": [
    {
      "entityValue": "i-0123456789abcdef0",
      "entityArn": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:instance/i-0123456789abcdef0"
    }
  ]
}

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EventBridge integration (real-time routing)

{
  "source": ["aws.health"],
  "detail-type": ["AWS Health Event"],
  "detail": {
    "service": ["EC2"],
    "eventTypeCategory": ["scheduledChange"],
    "eventTypeCode": ["AWS_EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED"],
    "region": ["us-east-1"]
  }
}

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Notification targets and routing

• Lambda (custom remediation code)
• Amazon SNS (fan-out notifications, SMS via SNS)
• Amazon SQS (buffering, durable processing)
• Step Functions (coordinated multi-step runbooks)
• Systems Manager (OpsCenter, automation documents)
• S3 (archival of events for audit)

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Common incident response use cases

• Proactive maintenance: handle instance retirement or scheduled host maintenance.
• Service disruption response: trigger failover, scale-out, or alternative routing.
• Security event response: rotate exposed credentials or quarantine resources.
• Capacity and quota planning: automate actions when limits change.
• Audit and compliance: archive events, correlate with CloudTrail and Config.

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API access and Support Plan requirements

• Basic: no AWS Health API access.
• Business: access to account-level Health APIs.
• Enterprise / Enterprise On-Ramp: access to account-level and organization-level Health APIs (aggregate across member accounts).

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Organizations integration and IAM permissions

health:DescribeEvents
health:DescribeEventDetails
health:DescribeAffectedEntities
health:DescribeEventsForOrganization
health:DescribeEventDetailsForOrganization

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EventBridge rule examples

{
  "source": ["aws.health"]
}

{
  "source": ["aws.health"],
  "detail": {
    "service": ["EC2"]
  }
}

{
  "source": ["aws.health"],
  "detail": {
    "eventTypeCategory": ["scheduledChange"]
  }
}

{
  "source": ["aws.health"],
  "detail": {
    "eventTypeCode": ["AWS_EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED"]
  }
}

{
  "source": ["aws.health"],
  "detail": {
    "service": ["RDS"],
    "eventTypeCategory": ["issue"],
    "region": ["us-east-1"]
  }
}

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Permissions for multi-account aggregation

health:DescribeEvents
health:DescribeEventDetails
health:DescribeAffectedEntities
health:DescribeEventsForOrganization
health:DescribeEventDetailsForOrganization

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Monitoring, troubleshooting, and observability

• Monitor EventBridge rule metrics (invocations, successes, failures).
• Use CloudWatch Logs for Lambda and Step Functions to inspect processing.
• Archive raw events to S3 for long-term audit and offline analysis.
• Correlate Health events with CloudWatch metrics, CloudTrail, and AWS X-Ray traces where applicable.
• Use the Personal Health Dashboard’s 90-day history to provide operational context during incident reviews.

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Best practices and recommended architecture

• Enable the organizational view in the Personal Health Dashboard when managing multiple accounts.
• Create narrow EventBridge rules to reduce alert noise and downstream costs.
• Filter SNS topics and use subscription filters to control who receives alerts.
• Archive events to S3 and/or push to a data lake for compliance and post-incident analysis.
• Test automation workflows (Lambda, Step Functions, Systems Manager documents) regularly in non-production before enabling production triggers.

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Integrations with other AWS services

• Systems Manager OpsCenter (create tickets, attach runbooks)
• Security Hub (correlate security findings)
• CloudWatch (generate custom metrics and alarms)
• Service Catalog (block or gate deployments based on health signals)
• Cost Explorer (assess cost impact during incidents)

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How AWS Health fits in the monitoring ecosystem

• AWS Health: AWS-initiated events and account-specific resource impacts.
• Amazon CloudWatch: Metrics, logs, alarms, operational monitoring for workloads.
• AWS CloudTrail: API call history for auditing and forensics.
• AWS Config: Configuration drift and compliance checks.