Manually installing and uninstalling 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) for Windows Server provided by Amazon:
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Windows Server 2012 R2 AMIs published in November 2016 or later
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Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022 (excluding Nano versions), and 2025
Install SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server
If necessary, you can manually download and install the latest version of SSM Agent on your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for Windows Server by using the following procedure. The commands provided in this procedure can also be passed to Amazon EC2 instances as scripts through user data.
SSM Agent requires Windows PowerShell 3.0 or later to run certain AWS Systems Manager
documents (SSM documents) on Windows Server instances (for example, the legacy
AWS-ApplyPatchBaseline
document). Verify that your Windows Server
instances are running Windows Management Framework 3.0 or later. This framework
includes Windows PowerShell. For more information, see Windows Management Framework 3.0
Installation on other machine types
This procedure in this topic applies specifically to installing or
reinstalling SSM Agent on an EC2 instance for Windows Server. For on-premises
servers, virtual machines, or other non-EC2 environments, use the
ssm-setup-cli
tool as described in Install SSM Agent on hybrid
Windows Server nodes.
Using EC2 installation procedures on non-EC2 systems can potentially
result in security vulnerabilities. The ssm-setup-cli
tool provides additional security protections for non-EC2 machines.
To manually install the latest version of SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server
-
Connect to your instance by using Remote Desktop or Windows PowerShell. For more information, see Connect to your instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
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Download the latest version of SSM Agent to your instance. You can download using either PowerShell commands or a direct download link.
Note
The URLs in this step let you download SSM Agent from any AWS Region. If you want to download the agent from a specific Region, use a Region-specific URL instead:
https://amazon-ssm-
region
.s3.region
.amazonaws.com/latest/windows_amd64/AmazonSSMAgentSetup.exeregion
represents the identifier for an AWS Region supported by AWS Systems Manager, such asus-east-2
for the US East (Ohio) Region. For a list of supportedregion
values, see the Region column in Systems Manager service endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.- PowerShell
-
Run the following three PowerShell commands in order. These commands allow you to download SSM Agent without adjusting Internet Explorer (IE) Enhanced Security settings, and then install the agent and remove the installation file.
Start-Process ` -FilePath $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\SSMAgent_latest.exe ` -ArgumentList "/S" ` -Wait
rm -Force $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\SSMAgent_latest.exe
- Direct download
-
Download the latest version of SSM Agent to your instance by using the following link. If you want, update this URL with an AWS Region-specific URL.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/windows_amd64/AmazonSSMAgentSetup.exe
Run the downloaded
AmazonSSMAgentSetup.exe
file to install SSM Agent.
-
Start or restart SSM Agent by sending the following command in PowerShell:
Restart-Service AmazonSSMAgent
Note
To uninstall the SSM Agent from a Windows Server instance, open Control Panel, Programs. Choose the Uninstall a program option. Open the context (right-click) menu for Amazon SSM Agent and choose Uninstall.