# Getting started with your Amazon Health Dashboard
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You can use your Amazon Health Dashboard to learn about Amazon Health events. These events can affect your Amazon Web Services services or Amazon Web Services account. After you sign in to your account, the Amazon Health Dashboard shows information in the following ways:
+ **[Your account events](aws-health-account-views.md)** – This page shows events that are specific to your account. You can view open, recent, and scheduled changes. You can also view notifications and an event log that shows all events from the past 90 days.
+ **[Your organization events](aws-health-account-views.md#aws-organizations-integration)** – This page shows events that are specific to your organization in Amazon Organizations. You can view open, recent, and scheduled changes for your organization. You can also view notifications, as well as an event log that shows all organization events from the past 90 days.

**Note**  
If you don't have an Amazon Web Services account, you can use the [Amazon Health Dashboard](aws-health-dashboard-status.md) to learn about general service availability.  
If you have an account, we recommend that you sign in to your Amazon Health Dashboard to get deeper insights into events and upcoming changes that might affect your services and resources.

**Topics**
+ [Setting up your Amazon account](#awshealth-before-you-begin)
+ [Viewing your account events in the Amazon Health Dashboard](aws-health-account-views.md)
+ [Configuring Amazon EventBridge](cloud-watch-events-integration.md)

## Setting up your Amazon account
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Before you can enable Amazon Health, you must have an Amazon Web Services account. If you do not have an Amazon account, complete the following steps to create one.

### Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account
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If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account, use the following procedure to create one.

**To sign up for Amazon Web Services**

1. Open [http://www.amazonaws.cn/](http://www.amazonaws.cn/) and choose **Sign Up**.

1. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Amazon sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to [http://www.amazonaws.cn/](http://www.amazonaws.cn/) and choosing **My Account**.

### Secure IAM users
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After you sign up for an Amazon Web Services account, safeguard your administrative user by turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA). For instructions, see [Enable a virtual MFA device for an IAM user (console)](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_credentials_mfa_enable_virtual.html#enable-virt-mfa-for-iam-user) in the *IAM User Guide*.

To give other users access to your Amazon Web Services account resources, create IAM users. To secure your IAM users, turn on MFA and only give the IAM users the permissions needed to perform their tasks.

For more information about creating and securing IAM users, see the following topics in the *IAM User Guide*: 
+ [Creating an IAM user in your Amazon Web Services account](https://docs.amazonaws.cn//IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_users_create.html)
+ [Access management for Amazon resources](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access.html)
+ [Example IAM identity-based policies](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_examples.html)