AWS troubleshooting: access denied, EC2 connections and health checks

Skills you'll practise

• Read an AWS access denied message and name the policy type to check first (explicit versus implicit deny)
• List the S3-specific causes of a 403 error, including Block Public Access, Object Ownership and KMS key permissions
• Match common EC2 SSH errors to their documented causes and fixes
• Check the security group, route table, network ACL and public address behind a 'Connection timed out' error
• Use ssm-cli get-diagnostics output to explain why an instance isn't a managed node
• Distinguish system, instance and attached EBS status check failures, and read alarm states and 'M out of N' settings

Course outline

1. 1.AWS troubleshooting from the documentationVideo · 2 min
2. 2.Reading 'access denied': IAM and S3Lesson · 17 min
3. 3.When you can't connect to an EC2 instanceLesson · 18 min
4. 4.Instance health and alarmsLesson · 15 min
5. 5.AWS troubleshooting: access denied, EC2 connections and health checks: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 18 questions
6. 6.Final exam11 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out

Sources it draws on

The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.

• AWS IAM User Guide: Troubleshoot access denied error messages
• Amazon S3 User Guide: Troubleshoot access denied (403 Forbidden) errors in Amazon S3
• Amazon EC2 User Guide: Troubleshoot issues connecting to your Amazon EC2 Linux instance
• Amazon EC2 User Guide: Status checks for Amazon EC2 instances
• AWS Systems Manager User Guide: Troubleshooting managed node availability using ssm-cli
• Amazon CloudWatch User Guide: Alarm evaluation