Viewing a Stack's Event History

It takes time to create and delete a stack's member resources. The amount of time depends on the complexity of your stack. You can track the status of the resources AWS CloudFormation is creating and deleting with the cfn-describe-stack-events command.

In the following example, a sample stack is created. The events are checked several times, showing the change in state of the stack's member resources as they are created.

First, the stack creation begins with the cfn-create-stack command:

PROMPT> cfn-create-stack MyCustomStack02
-f MyCustomAlarms.template
--parameters "Email=valid-email-address"

arn:aws:cfn:us-east-1:165024647323:stack/d835bc30-2ff8-11e0-a09f-5017c2aa8c86/MyCustomStack02

The cfn-describe-stack-events command is run within 10 seconds of the response from cfn-create-stack.

PROMPT> cfn-describe-stack-events MyCustomStack02

STACK_EVENT  MyCustomStack02  MyInstance        AWS::EC2::Instance
2011-02-04T00:51:07Z  CREATE_IN_PROGRESS

STACK_EVENT  MyCustomStack02  MyEventStack02  AWS::CloudFormation::Stack
2011-02-04T00:51:04Z  CREATE_IN_PROGRESS  User Initiated
        

You can opt for a full listing with the --show-long option:

PROMPT> cfn-describe-stack-events MyEventStack02 --show-long

STACK_EVENT,
db20a720-2ff8-11e0-9db9-5081c39d0e19,
MyEventStack02,arn:aws:aws21:us-east-1:165024647323:stack/d835bc30-2ff8-11e0-a09f-5017c2aa8c86/MyEventStack02,
MyInstance,
MyEventStack02-MyInstance-ZUJ095B3FP66,
"{"AvailabilityZone":"us-east-1a","ImageId":"ami-20b65349"}",
AWS::EC2::Instance,2011-02-04T00:51:07Z,CREATE_IN_PROGRESS,(nil)

STACK_EVENT,
d847bd90-2ff8-11e0-a09f-5017c2aa8c86,
MyEventStack02,arn:aws:aws21:us-east-1:165024647323:stack/
   d835bc30-2ff8-11e0-a09f-5017c2aa8c86/MyEventStack02,
MyEventStack02,arn:aws:aws21:us-east-1:165024647323:stack/
   d835bc30-2ff8-11e0-a09f-5017c2aa8c86/MyEventStack02,
{"Email":"tom@fictitious.corp"},
AWS::CloudFormation::Stack,2011-02-04T00:51:04Z,CREATE_IN_PROGRESS,User Initiated
        

The long report lists all the available history data on the two events. The most recent events are reported first. The following data points are returned in the long report: