Installing and configuring SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server - AWS Systems Manager

Installing and configuring SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is preinstalled, by default, on the following Amazon Machine Images (AMIs):

  • Windows Server 2008-2012 R2 AMIs published in November 2016 or later

  • Windows Server 2016 and 2019

Important

As of January 14, 2020, Windows Server 2008 is no longer supported for feature or security updates from Microsoft. Windows Server 2008 AMIs do include SSM Agent, but the agent is no longer updated for this operating system.

Windows Server AMIs published before November 2016 use the EC2Config service to process requests and configure instances.

Unless you have a specific reason for using the EC2Config service, or an earlier version of SSM Agent, to process Systems Manager requests, we recommend that you download and install the latest version of SSM Agent to each of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or hybrid instances that are configured for Systems Manager.

Important

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new capabilities are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing capabilities. If an older version of the agent is running on an instance, some SSM Agent processes can fail. For that reason, we recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up-to-date on your instances. For information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. Subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes page on GitHub to get notifications about SSM Agent updates.

To view details about the different versions of SSM Agent, see the release notes.

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