Use GetConsoleOutput with a CLI

Example 1: To get the console output

The following get-console-output example gets the console output for the specified Linux instance.

aws ec2 get-console-output \
    --instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0

Output:

{
    "InstanceId": "i-1234567890abcdef0",
    "Timestamp": "2013-07-25T21:23:53.000Z",
    "Output": "..."
}

For more information, see Instance console output in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Example 2: To get the latest console output

The following get-console-output example gets the latest console output for the specified Linux instance.

aws ec2 get-console-output \
    --instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0 \
    --latest \
    --output text

Output:

i-1234567890abcdef0 [    0.000000] Command line: root=LABEL=/ console=tty1 console=ttyS0 selinux=0 nvme_core.io_timeout=4294967295
[    0.000000] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x001: 'x87 floating point registers'
[    0.000000] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x002: 'SSE registers'
[    0.000000] x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x004: 'AVX registers'
...
Cloud-init v. 0.7.6 finished at Wed, 09 May 2018 19:01:13 +0000. Datasource DataSourceEc2.  Up 21.50 seconds
Amazon Linux AMI release 2018.03
Kernel 4.14.26-46.32.amzn1.x

For more information, see Instance console output in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Example 1: This example gets the console output for the specified Linux instance. The console output is encoded.

Get-EC2ConsoleOutput -InstanceId i-0e19abcd47c123456

Output:

InstanceId          Output
----------          ------
i-0e194d3c47c123637 WyAgICAwLjAwMDAwMF0gQ29tbW...bGU9dHR5UzAgc2Vs

Example 2: This example stores the encoded console output in a variable and then decodes it.

$Output_encoded = (Get-EC2ConsoleOutput -InstanceId i-0e19abcd47c123456).Output
[System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String($Output_encoded))