Status Checks for Your Instances

With instance status monitoring, you can quickly determine whether Amazon EC2 has detected any problems that might prevent your instances from running applications. Amazon EC2 performs automated checks on every running EC2 instance to identify hardware and software issues. You can view the results of these status checks to identify specific and detectable problems. This data augments the information that Amazon EC2 already provides about the intended state of each instance (such as pending, running, stopping) as well as the utilization metrics that Amazon CloudWatch monitors (CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk activity).

Status checks are performed every minute and each returns a pass or a fail status. If all checks pass, the overall status of the instance is OK. If one or more checks fail, the overall status is impaired. Status checks are built into Amazon EC2, so they cannot be disabled or deleted. You can, however create or delete alarms that are triggered based on the result of the status checks. For example, you can create an alarm to warn you if status checks fail on a specific instance. For more information, see Creating and Editing Status Check Alarms.

Contents

Types of Status Checks

There are two types of status checks: system status checks and instance status checks.

System Status Checks

Monitor the AWS systems required to use your instance to ensure they are working properly. These checks detect problems with your instance that require AWS involvement to repair. When a system status check fails, you can choose to wait for AWS to fix the issue, or you can resolve it yourself (for example, by stopping and starting an instance, or by terminating and replacing an instance).

The following are examples of problems that can cause system status checks to fail:

Loss of network connectivity
Loss of system power
Software issues on the physical host
Hardware issues on the physical host

Instance Status Checks

Monitor the software and network configuration of your individual instance. These checks detect problems that require your involvement to repair. When an instance status check fails, typically you will need to address the problem yourself (for example, by rebooting the instance or by making instance configuration changes).

The following are examples of problems that can cause instance status checks to fail:

Failed system status checks
Incorrect networking or startup configuration
Exhausted memory
Corrupted file system
Incompatible kernel

Viewing Status Checks

Amazon EC2 provides you with several ways to view and work with status checks.

Viewing Status Using the Console

You can view status checks using the AWS Management Console.

To view status checks using the console

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
In the navigation pane, choose Instances.
On the Instances page, the Status Checks column lists the operational status of each instance.
To view the status of a specific instance, select the instance, and then choose the Status Checks tab.
If you have an instance with a failed status check and the instance has been unreachable for over 20 minutes, choose AWS Support to submit a request for assistance. To troubleshoot system or instance status check failures yourself, see Troubleshooting Instances with Failed Status Checks.

Viewing Status Using the AWS CLI

You can view status checks for running instances using the describe-instance-status command.

To view the status of all instances, use the following command:

aws ec2 describe-instance-status

To get the status of all instances with a instance status of impaired:

aws ec2 describe-instance-status --filters Name=instance-status.status,Values=impaired

To get the status of a single instance, use the following command:

aws ec2 describe-instance-status --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0

If you have an instance with a failed status check, see Troubleshooting Instances with Failed Status Checks.

API

You can use the DescribeInstanceStatus action to retrieve the status of your instances. For more information, see DescribeInstanceStatus in the Amazon EC2 API Reference.

Reporting Instance Status

You can provide feedback if you are having problems with an instance whose status is not shown as impaired, or want to send AWS additional details about the problems you are experiencing with an impaired instance.

We use reported feedback to identify issues impacting multiple customers, but do not respond to individual account issues. Providing feedback does not change the status check results that you currently see for the instance.

Reporting Status Feedback Using the Console

To report instance status using the console

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
In the navigation pane, choose Instances.
Select the instance.
Select the Status Checks tab, and then choose Submit feedback.
Complete the Report Instance Status form, and then choose Submit.

Reporting Status Feedback Using the AWS CLI

Use the following report-instance-status command to send feedback about the status of an impaired instance:

aws ec2 report-instance-status --instances i-1234567890abcdef0 --status impaired --reason-codes code

Reporting Status Feedback Using the API

Use the ReportInstanceStatus action to send feedback about the status of an instance. If your experience with the instance differs from the instance status returned by the DescribeInstanceStatus action, use ReportInstanceStatus to report your experience with the instance. Amazon EC2 collects this information to improve the accuracy of status checks. For more information, see ReportInstanceStatus in the Amazon EC2 API Reference.

Creating and Editing Status Check Alarms

You can create instance status and system status alarms to notify you when an instance has a failed status check.

Creating a Status Check Alarm Using the Console

You can create status check alarms for an existing instance to monitor instance status or system status. You can configure the alarm to send you a notification by email or stop, terminate, or recover an instance when it fails an instance status check or system status check.

To create a status check alarm

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
In the navigation pane, choose Instances.
Select the instance.
Select the Status Checks tab, and then choose Create Status Check Alarm.
Select Send a notification to. Choose an existing SNS topic, or click create topic to create a new one. If creating a new topic, in With these recipients, enter your email address and the addresses of any additional recipients, separated by commas.
(Optional) Choose Take the action, and then select the action that you'd like to take.
In Whenever, select the status check that you want to be notified about.
Note
If you selected Recover this instance in the previous step, select Status Check Failed (System).
In For at least, set the number of periods you want to evaluate and in consecutive periods, select the evaluation period duration before triggering the alarm and sending an email.
(Optional) In Name of alarm, replace the default name with another name for the alarm.
Choose Create Alarm.
Important
If you added an email address to the list of recipients or created a new topic, Amazon SNS sends a subscription confirmation email message to each new address. Each recipient must confirm the subscription by clicking the link contained in that message. Alert notifications are sent only to confirmed addresses.

If you need to make changes to an instance status alarm, you can edit it.

To edit a status check alarm

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
In the navigation pane, choose Instances.
Select the instance, choose Actions, select CloudWatch Monitoring, and then choose Add/Edit Alarms.
In the Alarm Details dialog box, choose the name of the alarm.
In the Edit Alarm dialog box, make the desired changes, and then choose Save.

Creating a Status Check Alarm Using the AWS CLI

In the following example, the alarm publishes a notification to an SNS topic, arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:111122223333:my-sns-topic, when the instance fails either the instance check or system status check for at least two consecutive periods. The metric is StatusCheckFailed.

To create a status check alarm using the CLI

Select an existing SNS topic or create a new one. For more information, see Using the AWS CLI with Amazon SNS in the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.
Use the following list-metrics command to view the available Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EC2:
```
aws cloudwatch list-metrics --namespace AWS/EC2
```
Use the following put-metric-alarm command to create the alarm:
```
aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm --alarm-name StatusCheckFailed-Alarm-for-i-1234567890abcdef0 --metric-name StatusCheckFailed --namespace AWS/EC2 --statistic Maximum --dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=i-1234567890abcdef0 --unit Count --period 300 --evaluation-periods 2 --threshold 1 --comparison-operator GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:111122223333:my-sns-topic
```
Note
- --period is the time frame, in seconds, in which Amazon CloudWatch metrics are collected. This example uses 300, which is 60 seconds multiplied by 5 minutes.
- --evaluation-periods is the number of consecutive periods for which the value of the metric must be compared to the threshold. This example uses 2.
- --alarm-actions is the list of actions to perform when this alarm is triggered. Each action is specified as an Amazon Resource Name (ARN). This example configures the alarm to send an email using Amazon SNS.

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