Monitor the solution

Logging and notifications

Instance Scheduler uses structured logging optimized for CloudWatch Logs Insights queries. This solution logs processing information for each tagged instance, the results of the period evaluation for the instance, the desired state of the instance during that period, the applied action, and debugging messages.

Logs are written to Amazon CloudWatch Logs in two log groups:

Warning and error logs are also forwarded to a solution-created Amazon SNS topic, which can be configured to send messages to a subscribed email address. You can find the name of the Amazon SNS topic in the Outputs tab of the solution stack.

Informational tags

When informational tagging is enabled (the default), Instance Scheduler writes tags directly to managed resources to provide at-a-glance visibility into the solution’s scheduling activity. These tags are applied using the AWS Resource Groups Tagging API and are updated each time the scheduler processes a resource.

You can enable or disable this feature using the Enable informational tagging parameter on the hub stack. For more information, refer to Update global configuration settings.

Informational tag keys

The following tags are written to managed resources:

Error codes

The following error codes may appear in the IS-Error tag:

Tag behavior

Tag governance considerations

Control tags

In addition to informational tags, Instance Scheduler uses the following control tags for specific features:

Tag capacity

CloudWatch Logs Insights queries

Instance Scheduler’s structured logging format enables efficient querying using CloudWatch Logs Insights. You can use Logs Insights to search, analyze, and visualize log data to troubleshoot operational issues and monitor scheduling activity.

Instance Scheduler provides pre-formatted log queries that you can access from the Saved Queries section in the CloudWatch Logs console:

For more information about CloudWatch Logs Insights, refer to Analyzing log data with CloudWatch Logs Insights in the Amazon CloudWatch Logs User Guide.

Operational insights dashboard

The Operational Insights dashboard provides visibility into solution performance and cost savings from scheduled instance management.

To access the dashboard, ensure Operational Monitoring is set to "enabled" in the hub stack parameters. Navigate to CloudWatch and select "Dashboards" from the navigation menu. The dashboard name is *{stack-name}-Operational-Insights-Dashboard*.

The dashboard displays managed instance counts, running hours saved, and Lambda function performance metrics.

Operational insights dashboard overview

Monitor Lambda execution times to ensure optimal performance (see Quotas). If execution times consistently approach the timeout threshold, consider increasing the Lambda size property or deploying Instance Scheduler to a region with lower latency to your managed regions.

Lambda metrics showing duration and error counts

Additional costs associated with this feature

This operational dashboard is powered by custom CloudWatch metrics collected by the solution that will incur additional cost. This feature can be turned off by disabling "Operational Monitoring" on the solution hub stack. This feature costs an additional $3.00/month plus additional scaling costs based on the size of your deployment. The costs are as follows:

*These costs are tracked per service category (EC2/RDS) and only for instance types actually used for scheduling.

*

Monitoring EventBridge Events

Instance Scheduler publishes scheduling and registration events to EventBridge event buses to provide visibility into solution operations and enable integration with other AWS services.

Event types

The solution publishes two main categories of events:

Scheduling events: Published when Instance Scheduler takes action to start, stop, or configure managed resources. These events include details about the instance, schedule, and action taken. start, stop, or configure managed resources. These events include details about the instance, schedule, and action taken.

Registration events: Published when resources are registered or unregistered for scheduling based on tagging operations.

Event destinations

IS-LocalEvents event buses: An IS-LocalEvents event bus is deployed in each managed region of each member account (including the hub account). Each bus receives events for scheduling actions and resource registrations within that region.

IS-GlobalEvents event bus: The IS-GlobalEvents event bus in the hub account receives a copy of each event sent to any IS-LocalEvents event bus, providing centralized monitoring across all accounts and regions.

Using EventBridge events

You can create EventBridge rules to:

Event structure

All events use the standard EventBridge format. The following examples show the structure for each event type:

Scheduling event:

{
  "Source": "instance-scheduler",
  "DetailType": "Scheduling Action",
  "Resources": ["arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:instance/i-1234567890abcdef0"],
  "Detail": {
    "account": "123456789012",
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "service": "ec2",
    "resource_id": "i-1234567890abcdef0",
    "requested_action": "Start",
    "action_taken": "Started",
    "schedule": "office-hours"
  }
}

Registration event:

{
  "Source": "instance-scheduler",
  "DetailType": "Resource Registered",
  "Resources": ["arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:instance/i-1234567890abcdef0"],
  "Detail": {
    "account": "123456789012",
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "service": "ec2",
    "resource_id": "i-1234567890abcdef0",
    "schedule": "office-hours"
  }
}

Each event contains these key fields:

Possible requested_action values for scheduling events:

Possible action_taken values for scheduling events:

Creating EventBridge rules

To monitor Instance Scheduler events:

For more information about EventBridge, refer to What is Amazon EventBridge? in the Amazon EventBridge User Guide.