AWS support for all resources

Up until recently, Cortex supported a select set of AWS resource types — ElastiCache, Kafka, RDS, s3, and a few others — but the platform now has additional support for importing the rest of the more than 100 resource types AWS offers.

To add resource types, you first need to update the role that Cortex is given in AWS. Navigate to AWS under Integrations in Settings.

To set up the role, select Add AWS configuration. The modal that opens includes instructions for granting Cortex permission in AWS. In the IAM policy, make sure to specify all the resource types you want to import into Cortex.

Make sure that the policy has permissions to describe ALL types that have been added. Because this is a dynamic feature, Cortex does not automatically determine this. One option is to start with ReadOnlyAccess permissions and remove sensitive permissions as deemed necessary.

Cortex will pull all the types you included in the IAM policy under the Cloud control types field in the Settings section. From there, select the types that you want Cortex to discover/import.

If a resource types doesn’t appear in the list, there is likely a permission issue, and the role isn’t set up to discover cloud control types. Make sure that “cloudformation:ListTypes”, “cloudformation:ListResources”, and “cloudformation:GetResource” are added to the permission, so Cortex can pull the list of all available types from AWS.

Once you’ve added resource types under Cloud control types, you can discover and import resources from the catalog. In the Add resources workflow, you can select Sync resources to populate the discovered resources list.

Any resource types that you selected in Cloud control types will also appear in the Resource definitions tab in the resource catalog. 

Note that resources imported from these types will all have AWS:: at the start of their name. 

AWS resources function the same as any other resource — you’ll see them appear in the dependency graph and in the discovery audit, for example, so you can quickly gain insight into your infrastructure.