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Auto-generating IAM Policy Documents

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For integrations that require authentication by an IAM role the CLI can be used to auto-generate one or more IAM JSON policy documents by deriving any necessary resources in your account to build a policy.

To use the IAM policy generators follow these steps -

  1. Follow this guide to install and configure the CLI (requires >= 0.17.0).
  2. Run the policy-gen command for your desired integration. For reference, see help below:
$ montecarlo discovery athena-policy-gen --help
Usage: montecarlo discovery athena-policy-gen [OPTIONS]

  Generate an IAM policy for Athena. After review, output of this command
  can be redirected into `montecarlo integrations create-role` or
  `montecarlo discovery cf-role-gen` if you prefer IaC.

Options:
  --database-name TEXT         Glue/Athena database name to generate a policy
                               from. Enter '\*' to give Monte Carlo access to
                               all databases. This option can be passed
                               multiple times for more than one database.
                               [required]

  --data-bucket-name TEXT      Name of a S3 bucket storing the data for your
                               Glue/Athena tables. If this option is not
                               specified the bucket names are derived (looked
                               up) from the tables in your databases. This
                               option can be passed multiple times for more
                               than one bucket. Enter '\*' to give Monte Carlo
                               access to all buckets.

  --workgroup-name TEXT        Athena workgroup for Monte Carlo to use when
                               performing queries. The "primary" workgroup for
                               the region is used if one is not specified.
                               [default: primary; required]

  --resource-aws-region TEXT   Override the AWS region where the resource is
                               located. Defaults to the region where the
                               collector is hosted.

  --resource-aws-profile TEXT  Override the AWS profile use by the CLI for the
                               resource. This can be helpful if the resource
                               and collector are in different accounts.

  --collector-id UUID          ID for the data collector. To disambiguate
                               accounts with multiple collectors.

  --help                       Show this message and exit.

$ montecarlo discovery glue-policy-gen --help
Usage: montecarlo discovery glue-policy-gen [OPTIONS]

  Generate an IAM policy for Glue. After review, output of this command can
  be redirected into `montecarlo integrations create-role` or `montecarlo
  discovery cf-role-gen` if you prefer IaC.

Options:
  --database-name TEXT         Glue/Athena database name to generate a policy
                               from. Enter '\*' to give Monte Carlo access to
                               all databases. This option can be passed
                               multiple times for more than one database.
                               [required]

  --data-bucket-name TEXT      Name of a S3 bucket storing the data for your
                               Glue/Athena tables. If this option is not
                               specified the bucket names are derived (looked
                               up) from the tables in your databases. This
                               option can be passed multiple times for more
                               than one bucket. Enter '\*' to give Monte Carlo
                               access to all buckets.

  --resource-aws-region TEXT   Override the AWS region where the resource is
                               located. Defaults to the region where the
                               collector is hosted.

  --resource-aws-profile TEXT  Override the AWS profile use by the CLI for the
                               resource. This can be helpful if the resource
                               and collector are in different accounts.

  --collector-id UUID          ID for the data collector. To disambiguate
                               accounts with multiple collectors.

  --help                       Show this message and exit.

FAQs

How do I use the generated policies?
After carefully reviewing the generated IAM policy documents you can create an IAM role and then complete onboarding.

👍

Recommendation - use infrastructure as code

The command cf-role-gen can be used to help create a Data Collector compatible IAM role by generating a CloudFormation template with one or more IAM policies.

Can I modify the generated policies before using?
Absolutely! Feel free to edit the policies to what best suites your account / usage.

What if I have more then one database or bucket?
The database-name option can be passed multiple times. By default any data bucket names are derived from your account, but you can override this behavior by specifying one or more data-bucket-name options.

If you want to give Monte Carlo access to all databases in a region you can pass \* as the database-name. When an asterisk is passed the same is used for the data buckets. To make this more granular you can pass specific bucket names with the data-bucket-name option.

What if my resource is not found?
By default the utility will use AWS profile associated with CLI during setup or the default AWS profile for the session.

To override this behavior use the resource-aws-profile flag.

This utility also uses the same AWS region as where the collector is hosted by default. Use the resource-aws-region flag to to pick another region.

Tips and tricks

Redirecting output
Status messages are outputted to Stderr, but the generated policy is outputted to Stdout. This means you can redirect the Stdout to a file to easily save the generated policy and still track progress. For instance, 

$ montecarlo discovery athena-policy-gen --database-name foo > mcd_athena_access_policy.json
Generating policy for Athena.
Looking up workgroup details.  [####################################]  100%
Looking up buckets details.  [####################################]  100% 
$ cat mcd_athena_access_policy.json
...

Process Substitution
The output of any commands can be used as input for another using process substitution. For instance,

$ montecarlo discovery cf-role-gen --policy-file <(montecarlo discovery glue-policy-gen --database-name foo) > mcd_cf_role_template.json
Generating CloudFormation template for creating a role resource.
Generating policy for Glue.
Looking up buckets details.  [####################################]  100%
$ cat mcd_cf_role_template.json
...

Listing Glue/Athena database names
The AWS CLI can be used to conveniently list all database names. You can page through this list to help decide what databases to add. For instance,

$ aws glue get-databases --query 'DatabaseList[*].Name'

Updated 5 months ago