Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud System manager agent is now installed on Amazon Linux AMIs

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute System Manager Agent is pre-installed by default on the Amazon Linux AMIs version 2017.09 and also available on the Amazon Linux Package repository. Earlier, the System Manager Agent was installed on all the Windows AMIs launched by Amazon. But now the system manager Agent is now installed by default on all the instances generated or launched from the Amazon Linux AMIs.

To get started with System Manager you need to first attach an Amazon Web Service Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to the instances with no additional configuration is needed. When you System Manager Operations like the run command is ongoing, restarting or updating will not interrupt and you can do this at any time. Agent logs can also be uploaded to Amazon CloudWatch where you can diagnose the agent without any need of logging into an instance to find the logs.

The System Manager Agents is an open source and it is available on GitHub where you can customise the agent as needed. System Manager is now available in all the commercial and GovCloud.