Modern Managed Service Providers (MSPs) manage a wide array of cloud services and are responsible for ensuring that their customers' cloud environments remain available, secure, and compliant. A key challenge they face is staying up to date with critical updates, planned events, and unexpected issues that could disrupt customer operations. AWS Health provides the real-time insights and notifications about events that could impact the availability and performance of cloud resources. MSPs need to manage these events, but configuring and managing AWS Health across multiple customer accounts and regions can quickly become overwhelming.
MontyCloud simplifies this complexity by streamlining the setup and management of AWS Health. Our platform empowers MSPs to configure AWS Health for their customers with ease and to react faster to outages or disruptions, providing rapid insight into whether an issue stems from an AWS outage or another problem. This ensures MSPs can minimize downtime and deliver higher-value cloud operations for their customers without the burden of manually managing each AWS account.
The Importance of AWS Health
AWS Health provides real-time insights and notifications about events that could impact the availability and performance of cloud resources. These events can include planned service maintenance, potential abuse activities, account-level incidents, and even public service disruptions.
Without properly monitoring these AWS Health events, businesses run the risk of facing unexpected downtimes or disruptions that could affect their critical workloads. For example, failure to act on a planned maintenance event could result in service interruptions that negatively impact business operations, leading to loss of revenue or customer trust.
MontyCloud’s Streamlined Approach for MSPs
MontyCloud simplifies the entire process of configuring and managing AWS Health for MSPs, allowing them to deliver proactive and reactive services for their customers with minimal manual effort.
Key Features of MontyCloud’s AWS Health Integration:
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Rapid Setup for Multiple Customers: MSPs can easily configure AWS Health across multiple customers in just a few clicks. This helps them stay on top of critical service events and prevent potential disruptions for each of their customers.
- Automated Notifications and Actions: MontyCloud’s platform allows MSPs to set up custom rules that automatically notify internal teams or create tickets in JIRA when specific events occur. This ensures no event is missed, and follow-up actions are taken on time.
- Centralized Dashboard for Visibility: MontyCloud provides MSPs with a comprehensive dashboard that displays all AWS Health events across a customer’s accounts, regions, and services. MSPs can monitor and manage events without having to manually check each account individually.
Preparing for Critical Events with MontyCloud
AWS Health often delivers service-related events 30, 60, or 90 days in advance, providing ample time for MSPs and their customers to prepare. These proactive alerts are essential for scheduling any necessary maintenance or planning mitigation strategies. By configuring AWS Health within MontyCloud, MSPs can ensure that they and their customers have visibility into upcoming events and can act ahead of time to avoid any disruptions.
Use Case Example: Proactive Response to a “End of standard support” event for Amazon Aurora MySQL version which requires action
Imagine that an MSP is managing an AWS account for a customer running an e-commerce application that relies heavily on Amazon Aurora service. AWS announces an upcoming “End of standard support” event for it that is scheduled to occur in the future.
The AWS Health Event for this will look like this:
Here’s how MontyCloud helps streamline the process:
- Initial Configuration: The MSP uses MontyCloud to configure AWS Health for all customer accounts. They set up rules to monitor AWS Health events for every customer account.
- Event Detection: AWS Health alerts the MSP in advance of the event. This notification is automatically captured by MontyCloud and triggers the pre-configured rule set by the MSP.
- Automated Notifications: MontyCloud’s platform sends out an internal notification to the MSP’s operations team, informing them of the upcoming maintenance. Simultaneously, the rule creates a JIRA ticket, ensuring the event is tracked, and follow-up actions are scheduled.
- Customer Communication: The MSP can easily communicate the details of the event to the customer, allowing them to plan their own maintenance window, reducing the risk of downtime. The MSP ensures that the customer is prepared to avoid any negative impact during the event.
- Remediation action: The MSP, after approval from the customer can use an automation playbook in the MontyCloud Automation library or import their own custom playbook and remediate the issue. The remediation playbook in this case will create a snapshot of the of the database and restore it. This eliminates the need to login into the specific AWS accounts to resolve issues and saves them time from having to write custom code.
The Value: MontyCloud’s solution enables MSPs to automate the detection, notification, and planning required for these critical events. By addressing these events proactively, the MSP helps customers avoid downtime, improve operational continuity, and focus on more valuable tasks.
Conclusion
AWS Health is a critical tool that helps MSPs monitor and respond to important events in their customers' AWS environments. However, manually configuring and managing AWS Health for multiple customers can be overwhelming. MontyCloud simplifies the process by automating the configuration and management of AWS Health, providing MSPs with centralized visibility and the ability to set up custom rules to respond to health events proactively.
By integrating AWS Health into MontyCloud’s platform, MSPs can ensure that they stay on top of critical events, keep their customers informed, and avoid unnecessary downtime. This allows them to focus on higher-value services like cloud optimization, helping their customers run more efficient and resilient workloads.
Take action today with MontyCloud and streamline your AWS Health management process! Request a demo here.
