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Medium GuardDuty · regional

GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring should be enabled

Checks that automated agent configuration for EC2 is enabled in GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring on this Region's detector, so GuardDuty deploys its security agent and analyses OS-level, network and file events on EC2 instances for threats. It also fails while GuardDuty is suspended in the Region. In an AWS Organization, only the GuardDuty delegated administrator can change this for a member account.

service
GuardDuty
severity
Medium
scope
evaluated in every region

How to fix it

  • Affects another check: This also passes GuardDuty.7 and GuardDuty.11, and the agent reaches only instances Systems Manager manages, so an instance failing SSM.1 stays unmonitored.
  • Can break clients: Automated agent configuration adds a GuardDuty VPC endpoint and security group to monitored VPCs, which blocks IaC deleting those subnets before Terraform AWS provider 6.43.0.

In the console

GuardDuty → Protection plans → Runtime Monitoring → Configuration

Runtime Monitoring
Enable
Automated agent configuration
Enable in the EC2 section, so GuardDuty installs and updates the agent through Systems Manager

With the AWS CLI

aws guardduty update-detector --detector-id <detector-id> --region <region> --features '[{"Name":"RUNTIME_MONITORING","Status":"ENABLED","AdditionalConfiguration":[{"Name":"EC2_AGENT_MANAGEMENT","Status":"ENABLED"}]}]'

With Terraform

resource "aws_guardduty_detector_feature" "this" {
  detector_id = aws_guardduty_detector.this.id
  name        = "RUNTIME_MONITORING"
  status      = "ENABLED"

  additional_configuration {
    name   = "EC2_AGENT_MANAGEMENT"
    status = "ENABLED"
  }
}

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