AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management & Governance

Creating contacts, escalation plans, and response plans in AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager

Creating contacts, escalation plans, and response plans in AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager

Many of our customers need an effective incident management and response solution to achieve operational excellence and performance efficiency. Transparency between those who are affected by the incident and those who respond to the incident is key to any incident management process. Finding the right team to mitigate the impact of application or workload incidents […]

AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager integration with Amazon CloudWatch Part 2

AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager integration with Amazon CloudWatch

This is the second post in a two-part series about AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager. In the first post, we covered onboarding steps like creating contacts, an escalation plan, and a response plan in Incident Manager. In this post, we discuss the integration between Incident Manager and Amazon CloudWatch and how Incident Manager components manage an […]

Automated just-in-time storage for SQL Server backup using AWS Systems Manager Automation

Automated just-in-time storage for SQL Server backup using AWS Systems Manager Automation

There are times when you need fairly large storage volumes for use cases that are infrequent but needed recurrently. For example, one AWS customer needed to have multiple terabytes of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes available for taking MSSQL full backups. The backup job was scheduled as a weekly task but the customer […]

Use AWS Control Tower to automate configuration of AWS accounts for ServiceNow IT operations management

Use AWS Control Tower lifecycle events to automate configuration of AWS accounts for ServiceNow IT operations management

Several organizations that I work with use ServiceNow’s IT Operations management capabilities for their on-premises infrastructure and want to leverage the same capabilities for their AWS environment as well. Some of the core capabilities of ServiceNow’s IT Operations management are ServiceNow Discovery, Event Management and Cloud Management. Currently, customers who want to enable ServiceNow’s Cloud […]

Delete Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics dependent resources when you delete a CloudFormation stack

Delete Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics dependent resources when you delete a CloudFormation stack

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor application endpoints more easily. It runs tests on your endpoints every minute, and alerts you if your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. These tests can be customized to check for availability, latency, transactions, broken or dead links, page load errors, load latencies for UI assets, complex wizard […]

Use the power of script steps in your Systems Manager Automation runbooks

Use the power of script steps in your Systems Manager Automation runbooks

Customers have been using AWS Systems Manager Automation documents for years to define to define a sequence of actions to take on their AWS infrastructure such as invoking an AWS Lambda function or copying an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). These documents, now referred to as runbooks, are simple to use, yet powerful. The aws:executeScript action […]

How to manage cost overruns in your AWS multi-account environment – Part I

How to manage cost overruns in your AWS multi-account environment – Part 1

AWS provides a flexible and secure environment where you can experiment, innovate, and scale more quickly. As you build and deploy your workloads, you need mechanisms to isolate your resources (for example, a resource container). You can use multiple AWS accounts for this purpose. An AWS account provides natural security, access, and billing boundaries for […]

How to manage cost overruns in your AWS multi-account environment – Part II

How to manage cost overruns in your AWS multi-account environment – Part 2

In the first post of this two-part series, we showed you two approaches for preventing cost overruns in a centralized budget management pattern: Applying a restrictive service control policy (SCP) to an organizational unit (OU). Moving the account to another OU with restrictive SCPs. In this post, we share how you can prevent cost overruns […]

Sending Standard CloudFront Access Logs to CloudWatch Logs for Analysis

Sending CloudFront standard logs to CloudWatch Logs for analysis

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront standard logs (also known as access logs) give you visibility into requests that are made to a CloudFront distribution. The logs can […]

¬Field Notes: Cross-account deployments in an AWS Control Tower environment

Field Notes: Cross-account deployments in an AWS Control Tower environment

AWS Control Tower helps customers put an orchestration layer on top of a multi-account strategy. When customers build applications, they often use separate accounts as part of a deployment pipeline so that they can validate changes before production. This best practice helps reduce blast radius should there be any issues with newer iterations. With AWS […]