Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server - AWS Systems Manager

Working with SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Windows Server

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is preinstalled, by default, on the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server that are provided by AWS. Support is provided for the following operating system (OS) versions.

  • Windows Server 2008-2012 R2 AMIs published in November 2016 or later

  • Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022 (excluding Nano versions)

Support notes for previous versions

Windows Server AMIs published before November 2016 use the EC2Config service to process requests and configure instances.

Unless you have a specific reason for using the EC2Config service, or an earlier version of SSM Agent, to process Systems Manager requests, we recommend that you download and install the latest version of SSM Agent to each of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or non-EC2 machines that are configured for Systems Manager in a hybrid and multicloud environment.

As of January 14, 2020, Windows Server 2008 is no longer supported for feature or security updates from Microsoft. Legacy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 still include version 2 of SSM Agent preinstalled, but Systems Manager no longer officially supports 2008 versions and no longer updates the agent for these versions of Windows Server. In addition, SSM Agent version 3 might not be compatible with all operations on Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2. The final officially supported version of SSM Agent for Windows Server 2008 versions is 2.3.1644.0.

Keeping SSM Agent up to date

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new capabilities are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing capabilities. Failing to use the latest version of the agent can prevent your managed node from using various Systems Manager capabilities and features. For that reason, we recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up to date on your machines. For information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. Subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes page on GitHub to get notifications about SSM Agent updates.

To view details about the different versions of SSM Agent, see the release notes.

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