1. AWS Health Dashboard

The AWS Health Dashboard provides personalized information about AWS service health and events that affect your account’s resources.


Two Views

Service vs Account Health

Service Health = "Is S3 having issues globally?" (public, general). Account Health = "Is YOUR EC2 instance affected by a hardware issue?" (private, personal). The exam usually asks about the Account Health Dashboard (formerly Personal Health Dashboard / PHD).

2. Account Health Dashboard Events

3. AWS Health + EventBridge Integration

AWS Health events are automatically sent to EventBridge, enabling you to build automated responses to health events.

Health + EventBridge Automation:

Pattern 1: EC2 Hardware Degradation
  Health Event: "Your EC2 instance i-abc123 has degraded hardware"
  → EventBridge Rule (match aws.health source + EC2 events)
    → Lambda: stop instance, create AMI, launch new instance
    → SNS: alert operations team

Pattern 2: Upcoming RDS Maintenance
  Health Event: "RDS maintenance scheduled for your instance"
  → EventBridge Rule
    → Lambda: create snapshot before maintenance
    → SNS: notify DBA team

Pattern 3: Certificate Expiry
  Health Event: "ACM certificate expiring in 30 days"
  → EventBridge Rule
    → SNS: alert security team to renew

4. AWS Health API

  1. Programmatic access to health events via API (DescribeEvents, DescribeAffectedEntities)
  2. Requires Business or Enterprise Support plan (not available on Basic/Developer)
  3. Use for: integrate health events into ITSM tools (ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Jira)
  4. Organization-level health view: aggregate events across all accounts in AWS Organization

5. AWS Health Aware

  1. An open-source solution by AWS for multi-account health event management
  2. Deploys Lambda + EventBridge + DynamoDB to collect health events across Organization
  3. Sends alerts to: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chime, email
  4. Filters by: service, Region, event type, account
  5. Free (you deploy in your account)

6. EventBridge as the Central Automation Hub

EventBridge connects health events, monitoring alerts, and service events to automated responses across all the services covered in this study guide.

EventBridge = Glue for Automation

Almost every AWS security, monitoring, and management service sends events to EventBridge. The standard automation pattern is: Service Event → EventBridge Rule → Lambda/SSM/SNS/Step Functions. If an exam question asks "how to automate a response to X," the answer almost always involves EventBridge.

Exam Tip

Health Dashboard: "Is AWS having an outage?" = Service Health Dashboard (public). "Is MY instance affected?" = Account Health Dashboard (personal). "Automate response to health events" = Health + EventBridge → Lambda. Health API requires Business/Enterprise Support. EventBridge is the central hub for ALL automated responses across AWS services.