1. Assessment

  • List non-compliant EC2 patch targets
  • Confirm Systems Manager manageability status
  • Collect instance context and priority signals
  • Map patch baselines and associations

2. Investigation

  • Confirm current compliance findings per instance
  • Review patch history and command results
  • Identify manageability and update blockers
  • Classify root cause and remediation path
  • Rank instances by technical priority

3. Summary

  • Produce detailed findings summary automatically
1 Credits

Assess and Prioritize Non-Compliant EC2 Patch Remediation

Overview

Investigate EC2 instances that are out of patch compliance, verify whether they are manageable through AWS Systems Manager, and identify likely causes of patching failures. This plan produces a prioritized remediation summary with root-cause classification, patch baseline mapping, Systems Manager manageability findings, and AWS-derived technical priority.

Execution Details

1. Assessment

  • List non-compliant EC2 patch targets
    Inventories EC2 instances reported as patch non-compliant and captures severity, missing patch counts, scan timestamps, account, Region, platform, and compliance data freshness.

  • Confirm Systems Manager manageability status
    Verifies whether each instance is registered and reachable as a Systems Manager managed node, including SSM Agent, heartbeat, and connection status details.

  • Collect instance context and priority signals
    Gathers instance metadata, tags, network exposure, IAM profile, grouping context, and technical priority clues from AWS records.

  • Map patch baselines and associations
    Determines patch baseline, patch group, maintenance window, and Systems Manager association context for each non-compliant instance.

2. Investigation

  • Confirm current compliance findings per instance
    Re-checks current compliance and patch state records to determine whether findings are active, stale, changed, or inconclusive.

  • Review patch history and command results
    Reviews Systems Manager patch operations, Run Command history, and maintenance window executions to understand whether patching failed, was skipped, or never ran.

  • Identify manageability and update blockers
    Classifies evidence of Systems Manager reachability issues, agent problems, targeting gaps, baseline issues, pending reboot state, or operating-system patch failures.

  • Classify root cause and remediation path
    Assigns a root-cause category and recommended AWS remediation path for each affected instance.

  • Rank instances by technical priority
    Prioritizes instances using AWS-derived signals such as production tags, internet exposure, critical patch severity, failed patch counts, and duration of non-compliance.

3. Summary

  • Produce detailed findings summary automatically
    Produces a per-instance summary of compliance state, Systems Manager manageability, patch baseline mapping, patch history, root cause, priority, and recommended remediation path.