Wondering how to fix EC2 status check failed? We can help you.

Often Amazon EC2 users report to us that their Windows instance goes down suddenly and becomes unreachable. Also while checking the status of the instance also we will receive failed status.

Here at Bobcares, we often handle requests from our customers using AWS to fix similar errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today we will see how our Support Engineers fix this for our customers.

How to fix EC2 status check failed

Before going into the steps for fixing this error we will see what causes this error.

What causes the status check to fail

An instance status check failure can  be caused due to any of the following problems with the instance:

1. Networking or startup configuration issues

2. Exhausted memory

3. File system issues

4. Failure to boot the operating system

5. Failure to mount volumes correctly

6. Incompatible drivers

Instance and System status failure

Generally, AWS monitors the health of each EC2 instance with two status checks. An EC2 instance becomes unreachable if a status check fails.

A system status check failure indicates a problem with the AWS systems that the instance runs on.

In this case, we can either stop and start the instance or migrate from the current underlying host.

Steps to fix this error

Since EC2 resources are Region-specific we need to check the  AWS Service Health Dashboard for service interruptions within the AWS Region to which our instance belongs to.

Then we must look for outages and status updates to confirm if the problem is on the AWS side.

If there is no outage, then we can fix this error with few steps. Prior to that, we must keep in mind the following important points to be aware of before stopping an instance.

Warning: Before stopping an instance, we must be aware of the following:

1. If we're not using an Elastic IP address, the public IP address is released when we stop the instance.

2. If the instance has an instance store volume, any data on the volume will be lost when the instance is stopped.

3. If the instance shutdown behavior is set to Terminate, the instance terminates when it's stopped.

4. If the instance is part of an Auto Scaling group, first we must detach the instance from the Auto Scaling Group. Then after stopping and starting the instance, we can attach the instance back to the Auto Scaling group.

Following are the steps to fix this error if it is not caused by any outage:

1. Firstly, we need to stop the instance.

Note:

If the instance gets stuck in the stopping state, we can force the instance to stop using the Amazon EC2 console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

If we receive errors when running AWS CLI commands, we must ensure that we’re using the most recent version of the AWS CLI.

2.  Now, we can start the instance. Generally, the instance starts on a new, healthy underlying host server.

[Need assistance? We can help you]

Conclusion

To conclude, we saw the steps that our Support Techs follow to fix this error for our customers.