Viewing stack event history

You can track the status of the resources Amazon CloudFormation is creating and deleting with the aws cloudformation describe-stack-events command. The amount of time to create or delete a stack depends on the complexity of your stack.

In the following example, a sample stack is created from a template file by using the aws cloudformation create-stack command. After the stack is created, the events that were reported during stack creation are shown by using the aws cloudformation describe-stack-events command.

The following example creates a stack with the name myteststack using the sampletemplate.json template file:

PROMPT> aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name myteststack --template-body file:///home/local/test/sampletemplate.json  
[
    {
        "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
        "Description": "AWS CloudFormation Sample Template S3_Bucket: Sample template showing how to create a publicly accessible S3 bucket. **WARNING** This template creates an S3 bucket.
You will be billed for the AWS resources used if you create a stack from this template.",
        "Tags": [],
        "Outputs": [
            {
                "Description": "Name of S3 bucket to hold website content",
                "OutputKey": "BucketName",
                "OutputValue": "myteststack-s3bucket-jssofi1zie2w"
            }
        ],
        "StackStatusReason": null,
        "CreationTime": "2013-08-23T01:02:15.422Z",
        "Capabilities": [],
        "StackName": "myteststack",
        "StackStatus": "CREATE_COMPLETE",
        "DisableRollback": false
    }
]

The following example describes the myteststack stack events:

PROMPT> aws cloudformation describe-stack-events --stack-name myteststack
{
    "StackEvents": [
        {
            "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
            "EventId": "af67ef60-0b8f-11e3-8b8a-500150b352e0",
            "ResourceStatus": "CREATE_COMPLETE",
            "ResourceType": "AWS::CloudFormation::Stack",
            "Timestamp": "2013-08-23T01:02:30.070Z",
            "StackName": "myteststack",
            "PhysicalResourceId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/a69442d0-0b8f-11e3-8b8a-500150b352e0",
            "LogicalResourceId": "myteststack"
        },
        {
            "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
            "EventId": "S3Bucket-CREATE_COMPLETE-1377219748025",
            "ResourceStatus": "CREATE_COMPLETE",
            "ResourceType": "AWS::S3::Bucket",
            "Timestamp": "2013-08-23T01:02:28.025Z",
            "StackName": "myteststack",
            "ResourceProperties": "{\"AccessControl\":\"PublicRead\"}",
            "PhysicalResourceId": "myteststack-s3bucket-jssofi1zie2w",
            "LogicalResourceId": "S3Bucket"
        },
        {
            "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
            "EventId": "S3Bucket-CREATE_IN_PROGRESS-1377219746688",
            "ResourceStatus": "CREATE_IN_PROGRESS",
            "ResourceType": "AWS::S3::Bucket",
            "Timestamp": "2013-08-23T01:02:26.688Z",
            "ResourceStatusReason": "Resource creation Initiated",
            "StackName": "myteststack",
            "ResourceProperties": "{\"AccessControl\":\"PublicRead\"}",
            "PhysicalResourceId": "myteststack-s3bucket-jssofi1zie2w",
            "LogicalResourceId": "S3Bucket"
        },
        {
            "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
            "EventId": "S3Bucket-CREATE_IN_PROGRESS-1377219743862",
            "ResourceStatus": "CREATE_IN_PROGRESS",
            "ResourceType": "AWS::S3::Bucket",
            "Timestamp": "2013-08-23T01:02:23.862Z",
            "StackName": "myteststack",
            "ResourceProperties": "{\"AccessControl\":\"PublicRead\"}",
            "PhysicalResourceId": null,
            "LogicalResourceId": "S3Bucket"
        },
        {
            "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/466df9e0-0dff-08e3-8e2f-5088487c4896",
            "EventId": "a69469e0-0b8f-11e3-8b8a-500150b352e0",
            "ResourceStatus": "CREATE_IN_PROGRESS",
            "ResourceType": "AWS::CloudFormation::Stack",
            "Timestamp": "2013-08-23T01:02:15.422Z",
            "ResourceStatusReason": "User Initiated",
            "StackName": "myteststack",
            "PhysicalResourceId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-2:123456789012:stack/myteststack/a69442d0-0b8f-11e3-8b8a-500150b352e0",
            "LogicalResourceId": "myteststack"
        }
    ]
}

The most recent events are reported first. The following table describe the fields returned by the aws cloudformation describe-stack-events command: