Getting started with Inventory Management

Inventory Management or just Inventory is yet another managed service provided by Systems Manager that is responsible for collecting operating system, application, and instance metadata from your AWS instances as well as those present and managed by Systems Manager in your on-premises environments. You can use this service to query the inventory metadata for mapping, understanding, and remediating EC2 instances based on certain software or regulatory compliances.

Let's look at a very simple example of enabling the inventory service for our Dev instance using the AWS Management dashboard:

1. To begin with, you will require both the SSM agent as well as the required IAM Roles configured on your managed instance. Once this is completed, select the Managed Instances option from the Systems Manager Shared Resources section.
2. Here, select your Dev instance and click on the Setup Inventory option as shown in the following screenshot:

1. On the Setup Inventory page, most of the options will be quite familiar to you by now, such as the Targets and Schedule sections, so I'm not going to dwell on them here again. The more important section here is the Parameters section, using which you can choose to either Enable or Disable different types of inventory collections. For example, since we are working with Linux instances, I've chosen to disable the Windows updates parameters while keeping the rest enabled.
2. The final field Write execution history to S3 basically allows you to write and store the inventory data centrally in an S3 bucket. This comes in really handy when you wish to collate your inventory data from multiple instances at a central location and then query this data either using services such as Amazon Athena or QuickInsights. Once completed, click on Setup Inventory to complete the inventory setup process.

You can now view the collected metadata of your EC2 instance by selecting it from the Managed Instances page and clicking on the Inventory tab. Here, choose between the various Inventory Types drop-down lists to view your instance specific metadata. You can toggle between AWS:Application, AWS:AWSComponent, AWS:Network, and AWS:InstanceDetailedInformation, just to name a few.

With this, we come towards the end of this chapter, but before we move on to the next chapter, here are a few key takeaways and points that you ought to try out!