AWS Systems Manager now diagnoses 6 more reasons why your EC2 instances go unmanaged!

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found news that will make anyone who's ever wondered "why won't this instance become managed?" really happy.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, AWS Systems Manager's diagnosis capability has been extended to identify 6 additional categories of issues that can prevent EC2 instances and hybrid-activated nodes from becoming managed by Systems Manager.

Before you can patch an instance, run commands on it, connect with Session Manager, or collect inventory, it first needs to be recognized as "managed" by Systems Manager. When an instance ends up unmanaged, figuring out why can honestly be a real pain.

The story so far

Until now, the diagnosis capability only covered network connectivity issues. If the root cause was something else, you'd often be left without a clear answer, and troubleshooting could take a while.

What changes

With this update, the diagnosis now covers a lot more ground. Here are the 6 new categories:

• IAM permissions issues
• SSM Agent version
• Instance status checks
• Operating system configuration
• Default Host Management Configuration
• Hybrid activation issues

This means many instances that used to come back with an "unidentified" result will now return a specific, actionable cause. That saves you the guesswork and helps you bring your whole fleet under management faster.

Dive Deep

You run the diagnosis across your instances from the Systems Manager unified console experience, and it reports the specific issues found in each category.

Every diagnosed issue comes with step-by-step guidance to help you resolve it. For some issues, you can even run an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook directly from the console to remediate the problem right away.

Here's the availability and pricing:

• Regions: available in all AWS Regions that are enabled by default
• Pricing: the diagnosis capability runs as Automation runbooks, so you pay standard Automation usage charges for the runbooks you run

Wrap-up

• Systems Manager's diagnosis capability now covers 6 new categories (IAM permissions, SSM Agent version, status checks, OS configuration, Default Host Management Configuration, and hybrid activation) in addition to network connectivity
• You can run diagnosis across instances from the unified console, with step-by-step guidance and, in some cases, one-click remediation via Automation runbooks
• Available by default in all enabled Regions, and priced as standard Automation runbook usage
• This one's especially useful if you manage a fleet of EC2 instances or hybrid nodes and have ever been stuck wondering why they went unmanaged!