Working with SSM Agent

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is Amazon software that runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, edge devices, and on-premises servers and virtual machines (VMs). SSM Agent makes it possible for Systems Manager to update, manage, and configure these resources. The agent processes requests from the Systems Manager service in the AWS Cloud, and then runs them as specified in the request. SSM Agent then sends status and execution information back to the Systems Manager service by using the Amazon Message Delivery Service (service prefix: ec2messages).

If you monitor traffic, you will see that your managed nodes communicate with ec2messages.* endpoints. For more information, see Reference: ec2messages, ssmmessages, and other API operations. For information about porting SSM Agent logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, see Monitoring AWS Systems Manager.

Contents

• SSM Agent technical reference
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with SSM Agent preinstalled
• SSM Agent version 3.0
• Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Linux
• Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for macOS
• Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server
• Working with SSM Agent on edge devices
• Checking SSM Agent status and starting the agent
• Checking the SSM Agent version number
• Viewing SSM Agent logs
• Restricting access to root-level commands through SSM Agent
• Automating updates to SSM Agent
• Subscribing to SSM Agent notifications
• SSM Agent communications with AWS managed S3 buckets
• Troubleshooting SSM Agent