In this article, you will learn how to View Scheduled Events on AW using AWS Web Console and CLI. AWS can schedule events for your instances such as a reboot, stop/start, or retirement. Please see How to find out who restarted Windows Server, the Various methods to launch the Event Viewer, and “How to detect if an application was uninstalled on Windows: Find out who has uninstalled an application via Windows Event Viewer“. These events do not occur frequently.

Note: If one of your instances will be affected by a scheduled event, AWS sends an email to the email address that’s associated with your AWS account prior to the scheduled event.

The email provides details about the event, including the start and end date. Depending on the event, you might be able to take action to control the timing of the event.

AWS also sends an AWS Health event, which you can monitor and manage by using Amazon CloudWatch Events.

View Scheduled Event via the Web Console

Here are the steps for viewing scheduled events using AWS Web Console. Open Amazon EC2 console https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

In the navigation pane,
Choose Events.
Select Instance resources from the filter list, and then select your instance for viewing the scheduled events.

In the bottom pane, locate Event type. The value is either system-reboot or instance-reboot

Note: Scheduled events are managed by AWS; you cannot schedule events for your instances. You can view the events scheduled by AWS, customize scheduled event notifications to include or remove tags from the email notification, and perform actions when an instance is scheduled to reboot, retire, or stop.

Viewing Scheduled Events on AWS using the CLI

AWS schedules events for your instances randomly due to hardware upgrade etc. Here are some of the scheduled events which can be viewed from the AWS console or CLI. In this section, our focus will be on the CLI.

Reboot,
System Maintenance
Stop/start, or
Retirement.

Here is the command to view details of a scheduled event for an instance and compare it to the Web Console information.

aws ec2 describe-instance-status--instance-id i-xxxxxxxxxxxxx

where i-xxxxxxxxxxxxx is the instance instance (server) id. For example, to get detailed information about the scheduled events, you can use:

aws ec2 describe-instance-status --query "InstanceStatuses[*].{Instance:InstanceId,Events:Events[*]}"

here is How to use the Reliability Monitor in Windows, Error: Failed to create scheduled task due to Windows Server Management service issue“, and H ow to create Bitbucket Repository.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, these events do not occur frequently. If one of your instances will be affected by a scheduled event, AWS will send out an email to the email address associated with your AWS account before carrying out this maintenance. Viewing scheduled events in advance can help you prepare.

Note: Often times, depending on the event. You might be able to take action to control the timing of the event such as Stopping and starting the Instance again. Thereby launching in on a new hardware and thus checking it on the AWS Web Console.

Note: When an instance is affected by a scheduled event, and it is part of an Auto Scaling group, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling eventually replaces it as part of its health checks, with no further action necessary on your part.

I hope you fund this article very useful on how to View Scheduled Events on AW using AWS Web Console and CLI. Please feel free to leave a comment below.