AWS Systems Manager Inventory Overview

AWS Systems Manager Inventory provides visibility into your Amazon EC2 and on-premises computing environment. You can use Inventory to collect metadata from your managed instances.

• Purpose: Collects metadata from managed instances (EC2 or On-premises).
• Metadata Collected: Installed software, operating system drivers, configurations, installed updates, and running services.
• Data Access: Viewable in AWS Console, storable in S3, and analyzable using Athena and QuickSight.
• Collection Interval: Configurable to minutes, hours, or days.
• Central Management: Data from multiple accounts can be aggregated into one account for centralized querying.
• Custom Inventory: Capability to create custom inventories for specific needs.

Enabling Inventory in AWS Console

1. Navigate to the Inventory section in the AWS Systems Manager console.
2. Enable inventory for instances by clicking "enable inventory on all instances".
3. View details in State Manager to confirm the state of the instances.

State Manager

• Function: Automates the process of maintaining the desired state for managed instances.
  • WS Systems Manager State Manager can be used to define the desired state of your EC2 instances, such as having an antivirus program enabled. You can specify this desired state in a State Manager document.
  • State Manager will then periodically check the state of your EC2 instances at the interval you specify. If it finds an instance where the antivirus is not enabled (which deviates from the desired state), it will execute the instructions defined in the State Manager document to enable the antivirus.
• Use Cases: Bootstrapping instances with software, scheduling patches for OS and software updates.
• Associations: Define the desired state and schedule for applying configurations.
• Leverage: Utilizes SSM documents to create associations.

Inventory Setup and Data Sync

1. Create an Inventory Resource Data Sync named "DemoSync".
2. Specify an S3 bucket for data storage.