AWS Systems Manager

• Allows you to centralize operational data from multiple AWS services and automate tasks across your AWS resources.

Features

• Create logical groups of resources such as applications, different layers of an application stack, or production versus development environments.
• You can select a resource group and view its recent API activity, resource configuration changes, related notifications, operational alerts, software inventory, and patch compliance status.
• Collects information about your instances and the software installed on them.
• Allows you to safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and management tasks across AWS resources.
• Provides a browser-based interactive shell and CLI for managing Windows and Linux EC2 instances, without the need to open inbound ports, manage SSH keys, or use bastion hosts. Administrators can grant and revoke access to instances through a central location by using IAM policies.
• Helps ensure that your software is up-to-date and meets your compliance policies.
• Lets you schedule windows of time to run administrative and maintenance tasks across your instances.

SSM Agent is the tool that processes Systems Manager requests and configures your machine as specified in the request. SSM Agent must be installed on each instance you want to use with Systems Manager. On some instance types, SSM Agent is installed by default. On others, you must install it manually.

Capabilities

• Automation
  • Allows you to safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and management tasks across AWS resources
  • A step is defined as an initiated action performed in the Automation execution on a per-target basis. You can execute the entire Systems Manager automation document in one action or choose to execute one step at a time.
  • Concepts
    • • Automation document – defines the Automation workflow.
      • Automation action – the Automation workflow includes one or more steps. Each step is associated with a particular action or plugin. The action determines the inputs, behavior, and outputs of the step.
      • Automation queue – if you attempt to run more than 25 Automations simultaneously, Systems Manager adds the additional executions to a queue and displays a status of Pending. When an Automation reaches a terminal state, the first execution in the queue starts.
  • You can schedule Systems Manager automation document execution.
• Resource Groups
  • A collection of AWS resources that are all in the same AWS region, and that match criteria provided in a query.
  • Use Systems Manager tools such as Automation to simplify management tasks on your groups of resources. You can also use groups as the basis for viewing monitoring and configuration insights in Systems Manager.
• Built-in Insights
  • Show detailed information about a single, selected resource group.
  • Includes recent API calls through CloudTrail, recent configuration changes through Config, Instance software inventory listings, instance patch compliance views, and instance configuration compliance views.
• Systems Manager Activation
  • Enable hybrid and cross-cloud management. You can register any server, whether physical or virtual to be managed by Systems Manager.
• Inventory Manager
  • Automates the process of collecting software inventory from managed instances.
  • You specify the type of metadata to collect, the instances from where the metadata should be collected, and a schedule for metadata collection.
• Configuration Compliance
  • Scans your fleet of managed instances for patch compliance and configuration inconsistencies.
  • View compliance history and change tracking for Patch Manager patching data and State Manager associations by using AWS Config.
  • Customize Systems Manager Compliance to create your own compliance types.
• Run Command
  • Remotely and securely manage the configuration of your managed instances at scale.
  • Managed Instances – any EC2 instance or on-premises server or virtual machine in your hybrid environment that is configured for Systems Manager.
• Session Manager
  • Manage your EC2 instances through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI.
  • Makes it easy to comply with corporate policies that require controlled access to instances, strict security practices, and fully auditable logs with instance access details, while still providing end users with simple one-click cross-platform access to your Amazon EC2 instances.
  • You can use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to tunnel SSH (Secure Shell) and SCP (Secure Copy) traffic between a client and a server.
• Distributor
  • Lets you package your own software or find AWS-provided agent software packages to install on Systems Manager managed instances.
  • After you create a package in Distributor, which creates an Systems Manager document, you can install the package in one of the following ways.
    • • One time by using Systems Manager Run Command.
      • On a schedule by using Systems Manager State Manager.
• Patch Manager
  • Automate the process of patching your managed instances.
  • Enables you to scan instances for missing patches and apply missing patches individually or to large groups of instances by using EC2 instance tags.
  • For security patches, Patch Manager uses patch baselines that include rules for auto-approving patches within days of their release, as well as a list of approved and rejected patches.
  • You can now use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to select and apply Microsoft application patches automatically across your Amazon EC2 or on-premises instances.
• Maintenance Window
  • Set up recurring schedules for managed instances to execute administrative tasks like installing patches and updates without interrupting business-critical operations.
  • Supports running four types of tasks:
    • • Systems Manager Run Command commands
      • Systems Manager Automation workflows
      • AWS Lambda functions
      • AWS Step Functions tasks
• Systems Manager Document (SSM)
  • Defines the actions that Systems Manager performs.
  • Types of SSM Documents

• • Can be in JSON or YAML.
  • You can create and save different versions of documents. You can then specify a default version for each document.
  • If you want to customize the steps and actions in a document, you can create your own.
  • You can tag your documents to help you quickly identify one or more documents based on the tags you’ve assigned to them.
• State Manager
  • A service that automates the process of keeping your EC2 and hybrid infrastructure in a state that you define.
  • A State Manager association is a configuration that is assigned to your managed instances. The configuration defines the state that you want to maintain on your instances. The association also specifies actions to take when applying the configuration.
• Parameter Store
  • Provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secrets management.
  • You can store values as plain text or encrypted data.
  • Parameters work with Systems Manager capabilities such as Run Command, State Manager, and Automation.
• OpsCenter
  • OpsCenter helps you view, investigate, and resolve operational issues related to your environment from a central location.
  • OpsCenter complements existing case management systems by enabling integrations via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and public AWS SDKs. By aggregating information from AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail logs, resource descriptions, and Amazon CloudWatch Events, OpsCenter helps you reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of incidents, alarms, and operational tasks.

Monitoring

• SSM Agent writes information about executions, scheduled actions, errors, and health statuses to log files on each instance. For more efficient instance monitoring, you can configure either SSM Agent itself or the CloudWatch Agent to send this log data to CloudWatch Logs.
• Using CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor log data in real-time, search and filter log data by creating one or more metric filters, and archive and retrieve historical data when you need it.
• Log System Manager API calls with CloudTrail.

Security

• Systems Managers is linked directly to IAM for access controls.

Pricing

• For your own packages, you pay only for what you use. Upon transferring a package into Distributor, you will be charged based on the size and duration of storage for that package, the number of Get and Describe API calls made, and the amount of out-of-Region and on-premises data transfer out of Distributor for those packages.
• You are charged based on the number and type of Automation steps.

Limits

Controlling User Session Access to Instances in AWS System Manager Session Manager:

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

You are managing the deployment process of your applications using CloudFormation where you regularly update the templates to map the latest AMI IDs. Since it takes time to do this all the time, you are looking for ways to streamline and automate this process.

Which of the following should you implement in this scenario?

1. Integrate AWS Service Catalog with CloudFormation to automatically fetch the latest AMI and use it for succeeding deployments.
2. Integrate CloudFormation with Systems Manager Parameter Store to retrieve the latest AMI IDs for your template. Call the update-stack API in CloudFormation whenever you decide to update the EC2 instances in your CloudFormation template.

3. Integrate AWS Service Catalog with AWS Config to automatically fetch the latest AMI and use it for succeeding deployments.
4. Integrate CloudFormation with Systems Manager State Manager to retrieve the latest AMI IDs for your template. Call the update-stack API in CloudFormation whenever you decide to update the EC2 instances in your CloudFormation template.

Question 2

A privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company hosts its rapid-evolving applications in AWS. For their deployment process, they are using CloudFormation templates which are regularly updated to map the latest AMI IDs. It takes a lot of time to execute this on a regular basis which is why you were instructed to automate this process.

In this scenario, which of the following options is the most suitable solution that can satisfy the requirement?

1. Configure your Systems Manager State Manager to store the latest AMI IDs and integrate it with your CloudFormation template. Call the update-stack API in CloudFormation whenever you decide to update the EC2 instances in your CloudFormation template.
2. Use a combination of AWS Service Catalog with AWS Config to automatically fetch the latest AMI and use it for succeeding deployments.
3. Use CloudFormation with AWS Service Catalog to fetch the latest AMI IDs and automatically use them for succeeding deployments.
4. Use CloudFormation with Systems Manager Parameter Store to retrieve the latest AMI IDs for your template. Whenever you decide to update the EC2 instances, call the update-stack API in CloudFormation in your CloudFormation template.

For more AWS practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check this out:

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Sources:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide
https://aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/features/
https://aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/faq/