What is the difference between the AWS Service health dashboard and the personal health dashboard?

Service Health Dashboard

Personal Health Dashboard

Lectures Description:

Hello, and welcome to this short lecture on the AWS Health Dashboards. I shall be explaining the differences between both the Service Health Dashboard and the Personal Health Dashboard and how you can use them to monitor the status of your environment.

AWS offers two dashboards that can help you identify issues that may affect your infrastructure and the resources that you're running within your AWS accounts, these being the AWS Service Health Dashboard and the Personal Health Dashboard. Both of these dashboards offer visibility into health issues that are affecting AWS infrastructure that impact AWS services. However, there is a fundamental difference.

The AWS Service Health Dashboard provides a complete health check of all services in all regions at any one time, and this can be accessed through the following link. The status of these services will be classified as any of the following states: the service is operating normally, informational message, service degradation, and service interruption. The Service Health Dashboard also allows the functionality of viewing the history of a particular service within a geographic location. This is useful to identify if an outage caused repercussions within your own infrastructure that you may have previously experienced. This history of service interruptions is kept by AWS for a year.

The Personal Health Dashboard differs to that of the Service Health Dashboard, in that it will notify you of any services interruptions that may affect the resources and services that you are using within your own AWS account. For example, if there were health issues with the RDS service and you were running RDS resources within your own account, you would be notified of any potential impacts to your resources. However, if there were service interruptions with the DynamoDB service but you were not using DynamoDB within your environment, then you would not receive a notification within your Personal Health Dashboard, as it would not affect any of your resources. To access your Personal Health Dashboard for your account, you can go to the following link.

When you're at the dashboard, you will see that it is split between three categories, these being open issues, scheduled changes, and other notifications. From here, you can view any issues recorded in these categories in further detail. For example, being able to view in advance plan maintenance related to AWS services that could potentially affect you. These notifications also provide detailed instructions on what steps to take to avoid any problems, or at least to mitigate them as much as possible. The Personal Health Dashboard provides a very simple overview of the health of AWS services that may affect your resources running in your own account. That brings me to the end of this lecture.

Coming up next will be a summary of the key points taken from this course.

Lectures:

Recently, AWS updated its Service Health Dashboard with an improved Interface, better responsiveness, and integration with Personal Health Dashboard – all combined in a new Health Dashboard. 

Back in 2008, AWS provided its customers with a Service Health Dashboard (SHD), showing the overall availability of AWS services. Later in 2016, customers were provided with AWS Personal Health Dashboard (PHD) and the AWS Health API to give a more personalized and granular view; and now, a new dashboard to further enhance its usability.

Niko Nakai, senior product manager at AWS, explain in an AWS Cloud Operations and Migrations blog post the reasoning for bringing a new dashboard:

As AWS itself has grown to millions of customers and a far greater number of resources across the world, it's increasingly difficult for the SHD to represent the experience of individual customers with a single aggregated status icon.

In addition, Corey Quinn, a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, commented in a tweet:

"Time to break your http://stop.lying.cloud nonsense," says @awscloud and launches a brand new status page for us to peruse: http://status.aws.amazon.com

Giorgio Bonfiglio, a principal operations fairy at AWS, pointed out one of the significant benefits of the new dashboard in a tweet:

One of the most important changes is how we post during large events: we used to publish updates for every impacting service, making it harder for customers to aggregate and for us to post quickly.
In the new dashboard, we'll publish a single message and tag services to it.

AWS competitors Microsoft and Google also provide health status information on their respective public cloud offerings. For example, Microsoft offers a status page, Azure Service Health accessible through their portal, and a REST API. And also, Google has a single status webpage for its cloud services.

Lastly, Quinn concluded in an extensive lastweekinaws blog post:

I think I can best sum it all up as "status pages are hard," "AWS gets it more right than they do wrong," "AWS PR needs to not only speak up more, but do so intelligently," and "the new status page is a win." We'll know more just as soon as a significant portion of an AWS region falls over.

Which AWS service provides a customized view of the health of specific AWS services that power a customer's workloads running on AWS?

• A. AWS Service Health Dashboard
• B. AWS X-Ray
• C. AWS Personal Health Dashboard
• D. Amazon CloudWatch

Suggested Answer: C 🗳️

Personal Health Dashboard gives you a personalized view of the status of the AWS services that power your applications, enabling you to quickly see when AWS is experiencing issues that may impact you. For example, in the event of a lost EBS volume associated with one of your EC2 instances, you would gain quick visibility into the status of the specific service you are using, helping save precious time troubleshooting to determine root cause.Reference:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/personal-health-dashboard/

AWS Personal Health Dashboard provides alerts and guidance for AWS events that might affect your environment. While the Service Health Dashboard shows the general status of AWS services, the Personal Health Dashboard provides proactive and transparent notifications about your specific AWS environment.

All AWS customers can access the Personal Health Dashboard. The Personal Health Dashboard shows recent events to help you manage active events, and shows proactive notifications so that you can plan for scheduled activities. Use these alerts to get notified about changes that can affect your AWS resources, and then follow the guidance to diagnose and resolve issues.

In this module we will walk through the enablement of the Organizational view of your Personal Health Dashboard, which allows you to centrally receive notifications about all the accounts in your environment.

Enabling the Organizational view for AWS Personal Health Dashboard

Log in to your Management Account and navigate to Personal Health Dashboard service in the console. On the left side panel, expand Organizational view and choose configurations.

Since we have deployed AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations is already enabled, so you should see a Success checkmark on the step #1.

1. Enable organizational view for AWS Health

Here there will be a button, highlighted, which says Enable organizational view.

Click on this button to allow the Personal Health Dashboard to start aggregating events from all the member accounts in your AWS Organization onto the Organizational Dashboard. It will take a few minutes, once it is completed we will see a Success checkmark, and a green Banner which says:

You have successfully enabled organizational view. Note that you will not have access to previous events, and only newly reported events will be available. View dashboard.

On the left side panel, under Organizational view, you will now see 3 options:

1. Dashboard: Which shows ongoing issues or events that may impact your environment from the past 7 days.
2. Event Log: Here you can find events that are closed or open and older than 7 days.
3. Configurations: Where you can manage the configuration for your AWS PHD.

Understanding Health Events across your Organization

To view the ongoing issues in your environment, choose Organizational view, Dashboard. There are 3 tabs: * Open issues - For issues that are ongoing in AWS within the last 7 days that might affect your AWS infrastructure, such as AWS service disruptions and API issues. * Scheduled changes - For items that are ongoing and where schedule, or items that are upcoming * Other Notifications - For issues that are ongoing in AWS within the last 7 days that might affect your AWS account, such as certificate rotations, billing notifications, and security vulnerabilities.

For all events which might have affected your accounts, review the Event Log under the Organizational view.

Events that might affect the accounts within your organization will be aggregated in these windows. Some examples may be issues with AWS Services or API issues.

There are 2 types of events:

Public Events: are service events not specific to any accounts in the organization. For example, a problem with the Amazon EC2 Service.

Private Events: are events specific to one of your AWS Accounts. For example, an issue with an EC2 Instance in a specific region that you use.

AWS Health provides notifications a guidance regarding the event, and in case of a private event, provides specific information about the affected resources in your account.

If you click on an event, you will access to more details of the event, in the details tab you will have access to: * Event name * Status * Region / Availability Zone * Affected accounts * Start time * End time * Category * Description

In the description section, you will see updated information, the time they are posted and messages regarding the AWS Services and API that are being affected and estimated time to resolution of the events when available.

Additionally, on the Affected accounts tab, there will be information about the accounts, and the resources within those accounts, that were affected, including the: * Account ID * Account name * Primary email of the affectedaccount * Organizational unit (OU) within the organization * Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) of the affected resources within each account.

For additional information, refer to the AWS Documentation for the AWS Personal Health Dashboard.