Reviewing and executing suggested runbook remediations for CloudWatch investigations

To review and execute suggested runbook actions for CloudWatch investigations

1. To view information about a suggested runbook, choose Review for information about how to execute the runbook steps.

   On the investigation details page, choose Suggestions.

2. In the Suggestions pane, review the list of hypotheses based on the system's analysis of the issue under investigation.

   For each hypothesis, you can choose from the following options:

   • Show reasoning – View more information about why the system has generated the hypothesis.

   • View actions – View the suggested actions for the issue. Not all hypotheses will include suggested actions.

   • Accept – Accept the hypothesis and add it to the investigation's Feed section.

     Note

     Accepting the hypothesis doesn't automatically run the associated runbook solution. You can view suggested runbooks before accepting a hypothesis, but you must accept the hypothesis to execute a runbook.

   • Discard – Reject the hypothesis and don't engage with it any further.

3. After you choose View action, in the Suggested actions pane, review the list of suggested actions you can take to address the issue. Suggested actions can include one or more of the following:

   • AWS knowledge articles – Provides information about steps you can take to manually address the issue, plus a link to more information.

   • AWS documentation – Provides links to user documentation topics related to the issue.

   • AWS-owned runbooks – Lists one or more Automation runbooks that are managed by AWS that you can run to attempt issue resolution.

   • Runbooks owned by you – Lists one or more custom Automation runbooks created by you or someone else in your account or organization, which you can run to attempt issue resolution.

     Note

     The system automatically generates this list of runbooks by evaluating keywords in your custom runbooks and then comparing them to terms related to the issue being investigated.

     More keyword matches mean a particular custom runbook appears higher in the Runbooks owned by you list.

4. After reviewing the hypothesis, you can examine a specific suggested action further and read related documentation by choosing Learn more. You can also choose Review details to inspect suggested runbooks owned by AWS and you.

5. When choosing Review details for runbooks, do the following:

   1. For Runbook description, review the content, which provides an overview of the actions the runbook can take to remediate the issue being investigated. Choose View steps to visualize the runbook's workflow and drill into the details of individual steps.

   2. For Input parameters, specify values for any parameters required by the runbook. These parameters vary from runbook to runbook.

   3. For Execution preview, carefully review the information. This information explains what the scope and impact would be if you choose to execute the runbook.

      The Execution preview content provides the following information:

      • How many accounts and Regions the runbook operation would occur in.

      • The types of actions that would be taken, and how many of each type.

        Action types include the following:

        • Mutating: A runbook step would make changes to the targets through actions that create, modify, or delete resources.

        • Non-Mutating: A runbook step would retrieve data about resources but not make changes to them. This category generally includes Describe, List, Get, and similar read-only API actions.

        • Undetermined: An undetermined step invokes executions performed by another orchestration service like AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, or Run Command, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. An undetermined step might also call a third-party API or run a Python or PowerShell script. Systems Manager Automation can't detect what the outcome would be of the orchestration processes or third-party API executions, and therefore can't evaluate them. The results of those steps would have to be manually reviewed to determine their impact.

        For information about supported actions and their impact types, see Remediation impact types of runbook actions in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

   4. Review the preview information carefully before deciding whether to proceed.

      At this point, you can choose one of the following actions:

      • Stop and do not execute the runbook.

      • Change the input parameters before executing the runbook.

      • Execute the runbook with the options you have already selected.

   Important

   Choosing to execute the runbook incurs charges. For information, see AWS Systems Manager pricing.

6. If you want to execute the runbook, choose Execute.

   If you already accepted the hypothesis, the execution runs.

   If you have not already accepted the hypothesis, a dialog box prompts you to accept it before the execution runs.