State change events for Amazon EC2 instances

Amazon EC2 sends an EC2 Instance State-change Notification event to Amazon EventBridge when the state of an instance changes.

The following is example data for this event. In this example, the instance entered the pending state.

{
   "id":"7bf73129-1428-4cd3-a780-95db273d1602",
   "detail-type":"EC2 Instance State-change Notification",
   "source":"aws.ec2",
   "account":"123456789012",
   "time":"2021-11-11T21:29:54Z",
   "region":"us-east-1",
   "resources":[
      "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:instance/i-abcd1111"
   ],
   "detail":{
      "instance-id":"i-abcd1111",
      "state":"pending"
   }
}

The possible values for state are:

• pending

• running

• stopping

• stopped

• shutting-down

• terminated

When you launch or start an instance, it enters the pending state and then the running state. When you stop an instance, it enters the stopping state and then the stopped state. When you terminate an instance, it enters the shutting-down state and then the terminated state.