Use Opsgenie Actions with AWS Systems Manager to run the EC2Rescue tool

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Now that Opsgenie Actions are GA, we have some more exciting news to share with you! You can integrate Opsgenie and AWS EC2 Rescue using Actions to troubleshoot your  Amazon EC2 instances and resolve operating system-level issues and collect advanced logs and configuration files for further analysis.

Here is an excerpt from the blog post, written by Preet Virk and originally published on the AWS Cloud Blog: 

To create an automation action on Opsgenie, you need a corresponding action channel for AWS Systems Manager. In the Actions tab of your team’s dashboard in the Opsgenie console, create an AWS Systems Manager channel with your AWS account ID, AWS Region, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Multiple actions can be created by using the same template as long as the account ID, Region, and role are compatible with the automation document.

After the automation template is created, you can add the related automation action from the Manage Actions section. Specify the name of action, select AWS Systems Manager as the type, and choose the action channel you created in the previous step. Then, select the AWSSupport-ExecuteEC2Rescue document from the AWS Systems Manager documents (SSM Documents) section. You can search for the document from the drop-down list or simply type the name of the document in the search box.

The next section lists the parameters that can be configured for the action. Opsgenie imports the parameters of the corresponding automation document of AWS Systems Manager directly. Parameters that are marked as “required” are mandatory for execution. For the EC2Rescue tool, UnreachableInstanceId must be provided, whereas LogDestination, EC2RescueInstanceType, SubnetId, and AssumeRole are optional.

Note: We recommend that you provide an Amazon S3 bucket name as the LogDestination, so that diagnostic information and OS level logs will be uploaded to S3. That helps in case the AWS Systems Manager Automation document doesn’t fix the issue and manual investigation is necessary at that point. The default value for SubnetId is determined as CreateNewVPC. However, you should consider VPC limit and access restrictions.

To manually execute an automation action, the related action needs to be added to the alerts using alert policies or integration rules (which can be done from the Advanced Settings of the integration). Since Amazon CloudWatch is a convenient tool to track the status of EC2 instances, you can add the *EC2Rescue action on the Amazon CloudWatch Events integration in Opsgenie. This way, whenever an Amazon EC2-related alert is created by Amazon CloudWatch Events integration on Opsgenie, you can easily execute the action from the alert itself.

To add the EC2Rescue action on Amazon CloudWatch Events integration, switch to the Advanced settings of the integration. In the Create Alert section, type EC2Rescue in the Actions field, then save the integration.

To finish the set up, view the full post here. Try it out and let us know what you think!