AWS OpsCenter

On the 1st of July AWS released a new blog around their the OpsCenter feature which is part of the AWS Systems Manager offerings.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/opscenter-a-new-feature-to-streamline-it-operations/

This shows very clearly their steps towards having an integrated helpdesk system embedded in the console for an Ops Team by use of the create OpsItems mechanism.

Aside: Will be interesting to see how this collates from multi-account environments over time.

Again, the blog only explores how to do this with the console and not with CloudFormation but does give a good example of how to setup an alert and see it end to end. Key take away is that you’ll need the roles of AWS resources being granted the create the OpsItems permission to enable the capturing of events into OpsCenter for it to be useful.

From the blog:

The feature aims to improve the mean time to resolution, making engineers more productive by ensuring key investigation data is available in one place.

Engineers working on an OpsItem get access to information such as:

• Event, resource and account details
• Past OpsItems with similar characteristics
• Related AWS Config changes and relationships
• AWS CloudTrail logs
• Amazon CloudWatch alarms
• AWS CloudFormation Stack information
• Other quick-links to access logs and metrics
• List of runbooks and recommended runbooks
• Additional information passed to OpsCenter through AWS services

This information helps engineers to investigate and remediate operational issues faster. Engineers can use OpsCenter to view and address problems using the Systems Manager console or via the Systems Manager OpsCenter APIs.