AWS Monitoring & Management
Health Dashboard
Personalized view of AWS service health events affecting your account
AWS Health Dashboard provides a personalized, account-specific view of AWS service events that could affect your resources, including service disruptions, scheduled maintenance, and security notifications. Unlike the general Service Health Dashboard (which shows public AWS-wide status), the Personal Health Dashboard surfaces only events relevant to your account and the specific resources you have running.
Personal Health Dashboard vs Service Health Dashboard
AWS has two health visibility surfaces that serve different audiences:
| Service Health Dashboard (SHD) | Personal Health Dashboard (PHD) | |
|---|---|---|
| URL | health.aws.amazon.com (public) | console.aws.amazon.com/health (requires login) |
| Scope | All AWS services globally; public status page | Events specifically affecting your account and resources |
| Relevance | Shows all issues whether or not they affect you | Filters to only events impacting your actual resources |
| Event types | Service disruptions | Service issues, scheduled changes, account notifications |
| Notification | Manual check or third-party monitoring | EventBridge + SNS, AWS CLI, API |
| Historical data | Limited | 90 days of event history |
A critical distinction: the SHD shows a green checkmark for a region even when 5% of customers are affected (AWS only posts public status for large-scale incidents). PHD will show you if your specific instances or services are impacted even if SHD shows green. Never rely on SHD alone for incident detection.
During AWS incidents, the PHD often has more specific information earlier than the public SHD. The PHD can tell you "your i-0123456789abcdef0 instance in us-east-1c is on impaired underlying hardware" long before a public status page post.
Event Types - Issues, Scheduled Changes, and Account Notifications
AWS Health events fall into three categories:
| Event Type | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Issue | Active operational events causing degradation or outage | EC2 instance retirement warning, EBS volume impaired, RDS connectivity issue |
| Scheduled Change | Planned maintenance that will affect your resources in the future | EC2 scheduled maintenance, RDS version auto-upgrade, certificate renewal |
| Account Notification | Important account-level communications | IAM policy changes, service feature end-of-life, billing alerts, security notifications |
Instance retirement events are among the most operationally important. When underlying EC2 hardware is failing, AWS sends an instance retirement notice through PHD with a scheduled retirement date. You must stop/start the instance (not just reboot) to migrate it to healthy hardware before that date.
Rebooting a retiring EC2 instance does NOT migrate it to new hardware. You must stop it and start it again. This is counterintuitive and frequently asked in interviews. A reboot keeps the instance on the same physical host; a stop/start migrates it.
EventBridge Integration and Automated Responses
AWS Health publishes all events to EventBridge (in us-east-1) under the source aws.health. You can create rules to trigger Lambda functions, SNS notifications, or Step Functions workflows when specific health events occur.
{
"source": ["aws.health"],
"detail-type": ["AWS Health Event"],
"detail": {
"service": ["EC2"],
"eventTypeCategory": ["scheduledChange"],
"eventTypeCode": ["AWS_EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED"]
}
}# Query Health events via CLI
aws health describe-events \
--filter "eventTypeCategories=issue,scheduledChange" \
--region us-east-1 # Health API is us-east-1 only
# Get affected entities for an event
aws health describe-affected-entities \
--filter "eventArns=arn:aws:health:us-east-1::event/EC2/.../..." \
--region us-east-1Like the Support API (Trusted Advisor), the Health API is only available in us-east-1. All describe-events and describe-affected-entities calls must go to us-east-1 regardless of the affected region.
A common automation pattern: EventBridge rule triggers Lambda when EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED fires. Lambda stops and starts the affected instances automatically, sends a Slack notification, and opens a ticket in Jira. This turns a manual runbook into a zero-touch remediation.
Organizational View and Multi-Account Health Monitoring
AWS Health supports an organizational view that shows health events across all accounts in an AWS Organization. This is enabled from the management account and provides a single pane of glass for platform teams monitoring hundreds of accounts.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Organizational view | See events affecting all accounts in the org from the management account PHD |
| Aggregated EventBridge | Health events from all member accounts flow to the management account EventBridge for centralized automation |
| Affected account visibility | See which specific accounts are impacted by a given event |
| Delegated admin | Designate a member account (e.g., Security Tooling) as delegated admin for Health organizational view |
# Enable organizational view (run from management account)
aws health enable-health-service-access-for-organization \
--region us-east-1
# List events affecting the organization
aws health describe-events-for-organization \
--filter "eventTypeCategories=issue" \
--region us-east-1Interview Focus Points
- 1What is the difference between the AWS Service Health Dashboard and the Personal Health Dashboard?
- 2Why can't you rely on the public Service Health Dashboard to detect incidents affecting your account?
- 3What is an EC2 instance retirement event and what is the correct action to take (and common mistake)?
- 4How does AWS Health integrate with EventBridge to enable automated remediation?
- 5Why is the AWS Health API only available in us-east-1 and how does that affect automation?
- 6How does the organizational view of AWS Health work and who can access it?
- 7Design an automated response to EC2 instance retirement notices using Health, EventBridge, and Lambda.