Walkthrough: Automatically update SSM Agent (CLI)
The following procedure walks you through the process of creating an AWS Systems Manager State Manager (State Manager) association using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The association automatically updates the AWS Systems Manager SSM Agent (SSM Agent) according to a schedule that you specify. For more information about SSM Agent, see Working with SSM Agent.
Note the following details about automatically updating SSM Agent:
-
Beginning September 21, 2020, auto-update installs SSM Agent version 3.0. For more information, see SSM Agent version 3.
-
To be notified about SSM Agent updates, subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes
page on GitHub.
Before you begin
Before you complete the following procedure, verify that you have at least one running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for Linux, macOS, or Windows Server that is configured for Systems Manager. For more information, see Systems Manager prerequisites.
If you create an association by using either the AWS CLI or AWS Tools for Windows
PowerShell (Tools for Windows PowerShell),
use the --Targets
parameter to target instances, as shown in the
following example. Don't use the --InstanceID
parameter. The
--InstanceID
parameter is a legacy parameter.
To create an association for automatically updating SSM Agent
-
Install and configure the AWS CLI, if you have not already.
For information, see Install or upgrade AWS command line tools.
-
Run the following command to create an association by targeting instances using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) tags. The
Schedule
parameter sets a schedule to run the association every Sunday morning at 2:00 a.m. (UTC).Note State Manager associations do not support all cron and rate expressions. For more information about creating cron and rate expressions for associations, see Reference: Cron and rate expressions for Systems Manager.
If you want, you can also target multiple instances by specifying instances IDs in a comma-separated list.
The system returns information like the following.
{ "AssociationDescription": { "ScheduleExpression": "cron(0 2 ? * SUN *)", "Name": "AWS-UpdateSSMAgent", "Overview": { "Status": "Pending", "DetailedStatus": "Creating" }, "AssociationId": "123..............", "DocumentVersion": "$DEFAULT", "LastUpdateAssociationDate": 1504034257.98, "Date": 1504034257.98, "AssociationVersion": "1", "Targets": [ { "Values": [ "
TagValue
" ], "Key": "tag:TagKey
" } ] } }The system attempts to create the association on the instance(s) and immediately apply the state. The association status shows
Pending
. -
Run the following command to view an updated status of the association you just created.
aws ssm list-associations
Note If your instances aren't running the most recent version of the SSM Agent, the status shows
Failed
. This is expected behavior. When a new version of SSM Agent is published, the association automatically installs the new agent, and the status showsSuccess
.