Category: AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager Explorer is a customizable operations dashboard that reports information about your AWS resources. Explorer displays an aggregated view of operations data (OpsData) for your AWS accounts and across Regions. In Explorer, OpsData includes metadata about your Amazon EC2 instances, patch compliance details, and operational work items (OpsItems). AWS Trusted Advisor is an […]

Cut costs by minimizing infrastructure when it’s not under heavy use, for example turning off EC2 and RDS instances nights and weekends. In this post you will learn how to do this using Systems Manager Automation Documents, State Manager, and CloudWatch Events.

Software Asset Governance or Software Asset Management is a key component of an organization’s cyber security strategy. Different aspects of Software Asset Governance find notable mentions in renowned security frameworks and standards such as SANS CIS Critical Security Controls, NIST Special Publication 800-53, and Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Control Matrix. The subject goes beyond cyber-security […]

This is our second installment of the latest news from AWS Organizations, which allows you to centrally manage and govern your AWS environment across accounts. We have had some exciting launches over the past few months, including new service integrations and Region expansions. Here’s the latest since April 2020: Create a backup policy that applies […]

Port forwarding is a useful way to redirect network traffic from one IP address and port number combination to another. With port forwarding, you can access an EC2 instance located in a private subnet from your workstation. In this post, we walk through a use case where customers have a strict security requirement for their […]

Are you an operations administrator trying to enable common configurations such as agent updates or patch scanning across your company? AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup now supports AWS Organizations. With this feature, Organization master accounts can now easily define configurations for Systems Manager to engage on your behalf across accounts in your Organization. You can […]

As organizations migrate their traditional data centers and applications into the AWS cloud, they also want to modernize their patching mechanisms in order to reap the benefits of operating in the cloud. We find that many customers are looking to move away from Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) for patching, and move towards an […]

In this blog post, we show you how to configure Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) permissions to federate users into AWS Systems Manager Session Manager. We demonstrate how you can use attributes defined in external identity systems as part of the ABAC decisions within AWS, with SAML session tags. For example, you can grant access to […]

Learn with Shree and Garry on how to patch Microsoft SQL Server with AWS Systems Manager.

Ansible is a powerful tool because it lets you handle many complicated tasks with minimal effort. Some time ago, I published running Ansible playbooks using Systems Manager blog when the first version of the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) document was released, which enabled support for Ansible. In that blog, I discussed the tight integration of […]