Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is preinstalled, by default, on the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server that are provided by AWS. Support is provided for the following operating system (OS) versions.

Support notes for previous versions

Windows Server AMIs published before November 2016 use the EC2Config service to process requests and configure instances.

Unless you have a specific reason for using the EC2Config service, or an earlier version of SSM Agent, to process Systems Manager requests, we recommend that you download and install the latest version of SSM Agent to each of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or non-EC2 machines that are configured for Systems Manager in a hybrid and multicloud environment.

Keeping SSM Agent up to date

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new tools are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing tools. Failing to use the latest version of the agent can prevent your managed node from using various Systems Manager tools and features. For that reason, we recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up to date on your machines. For information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. Subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes page on GitHub to get notifications about SSM Agent updates.

To view details about the different versions of SSM Agent, see the release notes.