AWS Health Dashboard
Visibility into AWS service events that affect you: the public service health page versus your account's Health Dashboard, account-specific and scheduled events, organizational view, automating responses with EventBridge, the AWS Health API and the plans that include it, and how Health differs from CloudWatch.
3 min read · Last reviewed · SAA-C03
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What it is
AWS Health provides ongoing visibility into the availability of AWS services and the health of your resources and accounts. It tells you about events in progress, such as an outage affecting your instances, and planned activities, such as scheduled maintenance or retirements, with guidance on what to do. The console for this is the AWS Health Dashboard. It is available to all customers and needs no setup.
Choose the Health Dashboard when a question asks how to find out whether an AWS issue is affecting our resources, or how to be notified automatically about scheduled maintenance and AWS service events.
Two views
| View | What it shows | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Service health (public page) | Reported events for all AWS services across AWS RegionA separate geographic area where AWS runs its services, such as us-east-1 in Northern Virginia, made up of several Availability Zones. Most resources live in one Region; you choose Regions for latency, data residency, and the services you need.Glossary entry | Anyone, without signing in |
| Your account health (signed in) | Events that affect your account and resources, including scheduled changes and other notifications | Users of the account |
The public page shows only general events. Sign in to see the events that are specific to your resources.
Features to know
- Organizational view: with AWS Organizations, see Health events centrally across all accounts.
- EventBridge integration: Health events go to EventBridge, so you can automate responses:
- Notify a team through SNS or chat.
- Run a Lambda function, for example to post to a chat channel or to start moving a workload off an instance that is scheduled for retirement.
- Send events to SQS or Kinesis Data Streams for other systems.
- AWS Health API (Application programming interface)A defined way for one program to ask another for data or actions, such as a set of HTTPS requests and responses. Every AWS service is controlled through its API, which the console, the CLI, and the SDKs call for you.Glossary entry: query events programmatically. It needs a Business Support+, Enterprise Support, or Unified Operations plan.
Health Dashboard or another option?
| If the requirement is | Choose |
|---|---|
| Is an AWS service problem affecting our resources | AWS Health Dashboard |
| Get notified about scheduled maintenance automatically | AWS Health events with EventBridge |
| Health events across all accounts | Organizational view |
| Our own application's metrics and alarms | Amazon CloudWatch |
| Who changed our resources | AWS CloudTrail |
Reverse mindmap: when the question points here
- Yes, when the question says
- AWS outage affecting our resources leads to Health Dashboard, account view
- Scheduled maintenance or instance retirement leads to Health scheduled events
- General status of AWS services leads to Service health page
- Automate and scale
- Act automatically on a Health event leads to EventBridge rule
- Events for every account leads to Organizational view
- Query events in code leads to AWS Health API, paid support plan
- No, when the question says
- High CPU on our instance leads to CloudWatch alarm
Key takeaways
- AWS Health shows AWS service events and events affecting your account and resources, including scheduled changes.
- The public service health page needs no sign-in; your account view shows resource-specific events.
- Send Health events to EventBridge to notify teams or automate fixes; use organizational view for all accounts.
- The Health API needs Business Support+, Enterprise Support, or Unified Operations.