Operations Management

Building Incident Management with AWS Health Dashboard - Automating Outage Notifications and Impact Analysis

A comprehensive guide covering service outage detection, automated notifications via EventBridge integration, and organization-wide impact analysis through Organizations integration.

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Two Views of the Health Dashboard

The Health Dashboard provides two views: Service Health (operational status of over 200 AWS services) and Account Health (events affecting your specific account). Service Health displays the overall operational status of AWS services, allowing you to check service outages by region. Account Health shows only events that affect your account, providing resource-specific information such as EC2 instance maintenance schedules, planned RDS failovers, and EBS volume failure notifications. Account Health events include the ARNs of affected resources, enabling you to immediately identify which resources require action.

Automated Notifications via EventBridge Integration

Health events are automatically sent to EventBridge, so you can use event rules to filter specific event types and route them to Lambda or SNS. A typical workflow involves automatically posting EC2 maintenance notifications to a Slack channel with a list of affected instances attached. You can also implement automated responses where a Lambda function receives Health events, temporarily removes affected instances from an Auto Scaling group, and restores them after maintenance is complete. When combined with AWS Chatbot, rich Health event notifications are automatically posted to Slack channels.

Organizations Integration and Organization-Wide Monitoring

By enabling the Organizations Health API (Organizational View), you can aggregate and review Health events from all accounts in your organization through the management account or a delegated administrator account. For large organizations operating hundreds of accounts, checking individual account Health Dashboards is impractical. Organizational View lets you centrally monitor events across all accounts and prioritize responses for high-impact events. The recommended approach is to use EventBridge rules to aggregate organization-wide Health events and send consolidated notifications to security and operations teams. For a systematic study of Health Dashboard from basics to advanced topics, books on Amazon are a great resource.

Health Dashboard Pricing

The Health Dashboard is free to use. There are no additional charges for viewing Service Health and Account Health or for sending events to EventBridge. The Health API (Organizations Organizational View) is also free. The only costs incurred are for EventBridge rule executions (approximately $1 per million events) and the usage fees for notification targets like SNS and Lambda. As a free security foundation that should be enabled across all AWS accounts, there is no reason not to adopt it.

Summary

The Health Dashboard is a service that provides real-time notifications about AWS service outages and account-specific events. Build automated notifications and automated responses through EventBridge integration, and centrally monitor organization-wide impact through Organizations integration. It is a foundational service for incident management that should be leveraged across all AWS environments.

Related Services

AWS Health DashboardA dashboard showing AWS service status and events affecting your accountAmazon EventBridgeA serverless event bus that routes events from AWS services and SaaS applicationsAmazon SNSA fully managed Pub/Sub messaging and notification service

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