Identifying Amazon WorkSpaces clients in your environment that are approaching end of life (EOL)

The Amazon WorkSpaces client end of life (EOL) policy is applicable to major and minor versions of WorkSpaces clients for WorkSpaces Personal and WorkSpaces Pools. In this post, I will help you gain insights into your Amazon WorkSpaces clients and help you prepare for client upgrades where needed.

The lifecycle of a WorkSpaces client version has three phases—general support, technical guidance, and end of life (EOL). During general support, full support for configuration issues is provided. During the technical guidance phase, support is provided for supported configurations. defect resolutions and feature requests are implemented for the most recent versions of the WorkSpaces client only. When a client version reaches EOL, no further support or maintenance is provided.

AWS recommends staying current on your client versions for best performance and quality. You or your end users download and install the latest client version from the download page.

I will show you how to get insights into the WorkSpaces clients in your environment that are currently in the technical guidance phase or have reached EOL, using three methods:

• Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights query.
• PowerShell script to download a list of WorkSpaces and users connecting with technical guidance and EOL clients.
• AWS CloudFormation template with details on technical guidance and EOL clients.

Prerequisites

1. Open the EventBridge console. In the navigation pane, under Buses choose Rules.
2. Choose Create rule.
3. For the Name enter WorkSpacesAccess. For Description enter WorkSpaces access and API calls choose Next.
4. Under Event Source select AWS events or EventBridge partner events.
5. For Sample event type, leave AWS events selected. From the Sample events dropdown menu, enter WorkSpaces and choose WorkSpaces Access.
6. For Creation method, select Use pattern Form.
7. Under Event pattern, for Event source, select AWS services.
8. For AWS service, select WorkSpaces.
9. For Event type, select All Events. Then choose Next.
10. Under Target type, keep AWS service selected.
11. For Select a target, choose CloudWatch log group.work
12. For Log Group, enter WorkSpaceAccess into the box after /aws/events/. Then choose Next.
13. Under Configure tags, you can optionally enter tag information and choose Next.
14. Review the summary and choose Create rule.

Creating a CloudWatch Log Insights Query for Technical guidance and End of Life clients

Create a dashboard and widget to display WorkSpace IDs connecting from a client that is EOL or in Technical Guidance.

1. Open the Dashboards section of the CloudWatch console for your WorkSpaces Region.
2. Select Create dashboard.
3. Name it WorkSpacesConnectionInformation and select Create Dashboard.
4. For Add widget, select Logs table.
5. In the Logs insights section, select the log group you created in the last step from the dropdown.
   Input the following filtering in the query section:query:
   fields @timestamp, @message
| fields account
| fields region, detail.clientPlatform, detail.clientVersion, detail.workspaceId
| parse detail.clientVersion "*.*.*" as majorVersion, minorVersion, subVersion
| filter ( (detail.clientPlatform = "Windows" or detail.clientPlatform = "OSX") and (majorVersion < 5 or (majorVersion = 5 and minorVersion < 22) or (majorVersion = 5 and minorVersion = 22 and subVersion < 1) ) or ( detail.clientPlatform = "Linux" and (majorVersion < 2024 or (majorVersion <= 2024 and minorVersion <= 5)) ) or ( detail.clientPlatform = "Android" and (majorVersion < 5 or (majorVersion = 5 and minorVersion = 0 and subVersion < 1)) ) )
| display detail.clientPlatform, detail.clientVersion, detail.workspaceId, detail.directoryId, timeSelect Create widget.
6. (Optional) Rename the widget Technical guidance and End of Life clients.
7. Select Save in the top right.

PowerShell samples to get detailed usage information

We’ve created a PowerShell module, which we provide in our Git repository, that you can use to get detailed information about your WorkSpaces usage and end of life clients.

Download and import WorkSpaces-CloudWatch-InternetMonitor-Queries.psm1. Once imported run Get-WksEolClients with the parameters for the log group, region, and optional parameters.

Get-WksEolClients -LogGroup "/aws/events/WorkSpacesAccessLogs" -region us-east-1 -CSVOutput $true -TimeinHours 500 -queryTimeout 30 -userLookup $true

Build a dashboard with WorkSpaces information

The Connection Insights dashboard displays the client versions, platforms, and IP addresses that are connected to your WorkSpaces. This dashboard allows you to better understand how your users are connecting so that you can proactively notify your users using an outdated client. The dynamic variables allows you to monitor the details of IP addresses or specific directories. To get started, download the CloudFormation template, and deploy the stack in your environment. See Creating a stack on the AWS CloudFormation console for more information on deploying a CloudFormation stack. Then, filter and sort by one or more fields to see the details you’re interested in.

Conclusion

In this post, I walked through three methods to get insights into the WorkSpaces clients in your environment that are currently in the technical guidance phase or have reached EOL. AWS recommends staying current on your client versions for best performance and quality. You or your end users can download and install the latest client version from the download page.

For additional information, refer to the Amazon WorkSpaces client end of life (EOL) policy. If you have further questions, please reach out to the AWS support team. For the latest on End User Computing check out What’s New with AWS , join our Community, and be sure to view our YouTube playlist.

	Dave Jaskie brings 15 years of experience in the End User Computing space. Outside of Work, Dave enjoys traveling and hiking with his wife and 4 kids.
	Henry is a Product Manager leading the Amazon WorkSpaces client & end user experience teams. He has 18 years of experience in product and joined AWS in 2024. Outside of work, Henry enjoys traveling with his wife and two kids, trying new food, and following international soccer / football and Formula 1 racing.
	Ross Green has been a Cloud Support Engineer at AWS since 2021 where he specializes in AWS End User Compute and Directory Services. Outside of work Ross enjoys singing, playing the guitar, and traveling.