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AWS Management & Governance Blog

Streamline server fleet management with AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager

Organizations manage an increasingly diverse IT infrastructure, one that spans cloud and on-premises environments and uses different tools and services. Managing these diverse hybrid environments can be complicated and resource-intensive. Fleet Manager, a new feature in AWS Systems Manager, makes it easy and cost-effective to remotely manage Windows and Linux servers running across AWS, on-premises, or in other cloud providers. This feature reduces your operational overhead and streamlines server fleet management without the need to spend time navigating through multiple services and consoles. With Fleet Manager, customers can view the health and performance status of their entire server fleet and easily drill down to individual servers to perform common troubleshooting and management tasks. This simplified UI experience can potentially eliminate recurring licensing costs of the expensive management tools you have used before.

Solution overview

In this blog post, I explain some of the server management capabilities that Fleet Manager provides:

Registry operations: You can view and modify registry values on your Windows servers.
User administration and security: You can view a list of users with access to a server and change user permissions.
Prerequisites

When you deploy a new Amazon EC2 instance with the AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) instance profile roles, your instance can be auto-discovered and managed through Fleet Manager. If an instance is not discovered by Fleet Manager, follow the steps in setting up AWS Systems Manager in the AWS Systems Manager user guide. You can also use Systems Manager Quick Setup to quickly configure the required permissions.

If you own on-premises servers and virtual machines (VM) in what is called a hybrid environment, follow the steps in setting up AWS Systems Manager for hybrid environments in the AWS Systems Manager user guide. To provide improved security posture of the managed instances, configure AWS Systems Manager to use an interface VPC endpoint. For more information, see use AWS PrivateLink to set up a VPC endpoint for Session Manager in the AWS Systems Manager user guide.

After you have configured the prerequisites, Fleet Manager provides an aggregate view of your server fleet and offers a set of tools that you can use on instances that need attention. Fleet Manager identifies the OS and environment of the selected server and provides a filtered list of applicable actions. You can perform multiple common OS operations on your server, including:
- Explore and tail files.
- Update user access permissions.
- View the CPU and disk utilization metrics.
- Collect and audit logs and change registry values.