AWS Systems Manager helps you quickly view operational data for groups of resources. You can quickly identify any issues that might impact applications that use those resources. Resources can be grouped by applications, application layers, production versus development environments, or anything else you choose. Systems Manager presents the operational data for your resource groups in a single, easy to read dashboard. You don’t have to navigate to other AWS consoles. For example, if you have an application that uses Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS, you can use Systems Manager to create a resource group for the application and easily see the software installed on your Amazon EC2 instances, any changes in your Amazon S3 objects, or database instances that have stopped.

AWS Systems Manager enables you to automate operational tasks to help make your teams more efficient. With automated playbooks along with rich text descriptions, you can reduce human error and simplify maintenance and deployment tasks on AWS resources. You can use predefined automation playbooks or build your own to share for common operational tasks such as stopping and restarting an EC2 instance. Systems Manager also has built-in safety controls. It allows you to incrementally roll out new changes and automatically halt the roll-out if errors occur.

AWS Systems Manager helps you easily understand and control the current state of your resource groups. With Systems Manager, you can view detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment through the Systems Manager Explorer and Inventory dashboards. Systems Manager is integrated with AWS Config so you can easily view changes across your resources as they occur over time.

With AWS Systems Manager, you can manage servers running on AWS and in your on-premises data center through a single interface. Systems Manager securely communicates with a lightweight agent installed on your servers to execute management tasks. This helps you manage resources for Windows and Linux operating systems running on Amazon EC2 or on-premises.

AWS Systems Manager helps maintain security and compliance by scanning your instances against your patch, configuration, and custom policies. You can define patch baselines, maintain up-to-date anti-virus definitions, and enforce firewall policies. You can also remotely manage your servers at scale without manually logging in to each server. Systems Manager also provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data, whether its plain text, such as database strings, or secrets, such as passwords. This allows you to separate your secrets and configuration data from code.

IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, such as ServiceNow, can connect with AWS Systems Manager. This makes it easier for ITSM platform users to manage AWS and third-party resources. The AWS Service Management Connector helps ITSM administrators improve governance over provisioned AWS and third-party products.