AWS Administration - The Definitive Guide - Second Edition

Configuring the SSM agent to stream logs to CloudWatch

This is a particularly useful option provided by the SSM agent, especially when you don't want to log in to each and every instance and troubleshoot issues. Integrating the SSM agent's logs with CloudWatch enables you to have all your logs captured and analyzed at one central location, which undoubtedly ends up saving a lot of time, but it also brings additional benefits such as the ability to configure alarms, view the various metrics using CloudWatch dashboard, and retain the logs for a much longer duration.

But before we get to configuring the agent, we first need to create a separate log group within CloudWatch that will stream the agent logs from individual instances here:

1. To do ...