Reviewing your stack on the AWS CloudFormation console - AWS CloudFormation
Determining root cause for failures

Reviewing your stack on the AWS CloudFormation console

The final step before your stack is launched is to review the values entered while creating the stack.

  1. On the Review page, review the details of your stack.

    If you need to change any of the values before launching the stack, choose Edit on the appropriate section to go back to the page that has the setting that you want to change.

  2. After you review the stack creation settings, choose Create stack to launch your stack.

    Note

    As this point, you can also choose to create a new change set rather than a new stack. To do so, click Create change set instead of Create stack. For more information, see Creating stacks using change sets

    CloudFormation displays the Events pane of the Stack details page for your new stack. From here, you can view your stack's events, data, or resources. CloudFormation automatically refreshes the stack events every minute. Additionally, CloudFormation displays the New events available badge when new stack events occur; choose the refresh icon to load these events into the list. By viewing stack creation events, you can understand the sequence of events that lead to your stack's creation (or failure, if you are debugging your stack).

    While your stack is being created, it's listed on the Stacks page with a status of CREATE_IN_PROGRESS.

    After your stack has been successfully created, its status changes to CREATE_COMPLETE. You can then choose the Outputs tab to view your stack's outputs if you have defined any in the template.

Determining root cause for failures

If your stack creation fails, AWS CloudFormation can help you to determine the event that is likely the root cause for the stack failure. Depending on the scenario and your permissions, AWS CloudTrail events may be able to provide further details about the root cause in case the provided Status reason in Events is not clear.

Note

Nested stacks don't support Detect root cause.

To determine the root cause:

  1. Select the failed stack.

  2. Choose the Events tab.

  3. Choose Detect root cause. CloudFormation will analyze the failure and indicate the event that is the likely the cause for the failure by adding a Likely root cause label to the specific event Status. See Status reason for further explanation of the status in the CloudFormation console.

  4. Choose the failed Status with the Likely root cause label to learn more about the cause of the failure. Depending on the scenario and your permissions, you may be able to review a detailed CloudTrail event. These are the following potential outcomes of choosing the Status

    • CloudTrail events related to this issue are available and may help with resolution. View CloudTrail events.

    • We couldn't find any CloudTrail events related to this issue that could help with resolution.

    • Your current permissions do not allow access to view CloudTrail events. Learn more.

    • In the process of checking for available CloudTrail events, check back in a few minutes.

    • An error occurred while fetching the CloudTrail events. For manual inspection, visit the CloudTrail console.

  5. If the provided reason in Status reason isn't clear, and the root cause displays a link to the CloudTrail console, open the link to view the event to find a detailed root cause.

For more information on CloudTrail events, see Understanding CloudTrail events and CloudTrail record contents.

For more information on CloudTrail event history, see Working with CloudTrail Event history.