Amazon WorkSpaces are invisible to SSM and CloudWatch (and how to fix it)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0600

I spent an afternoon arguing with Windows about whether I was allowed to be root on a machine I created. Six hours and six layers of undocumented workarounds later, I got CMMC-compliant audit logging on a desktop that doesn’t know it exists.

The problem

WorkSpaces don’t show up in AWS Systems Manager. They’re not EC2 instances — no instance profile, no metadata endpoint, no identity. SSM Agent is pre-installed but thinks it’s nobody. CloudWatch Agent has no credentials and doesn’t know what region it’s in.

Ssm on ferkakta.dev

Amazon WorkSpaces are invisible to SSM and CloudWatch (and how to fix it)

The problem