Set up permissions - AWS Resource Groups
Permissions for individual services Required permissions for Resource Groups and Tag Editor

Set up permissions

To make full use of Resource Groups and Tag Editor, you might need additional permissions to tag resources or to see a resource's tag keys and values. These permissions fall into the following categories:

  • Permissions for individual services so that you can tag resources from those services and include them in resource groups.

  • Permissions that are required to use the Tag Editor console

  • Permissions that are required to use the AWS Resource Groups console and API.

If you are an administrator, you can provide permissions for your users by creating policies through the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. You first create your principals, such as IAM roles or users, or associate external identities with your AWS environment using a service like AWS IAM Identity Center. Then you apply policies with the permissions that your users need. For information about creating and attaching IAM policies, see Working with policies.

Permissions for individual services

Important

This section describes permissions that are required if you want to tag resources from other service consoles and APIs, and add those resources to resource groups.

As described in Resources and their group types, each resource group represents a collection of resources of specified types that share one or more tag keys or values. To add tags to a resource, you need the permissions required for the service to which the resource belongs. For example, to tag Amazon EC2 instances, your must have permissions to the tagging actions in that service's API, such as those listed in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

To make full use of the Resource Groups feature, you need other permissions that allow you to access a service's console and interact with the resources there. For examples of such policies for Amazon EC2, see Example policies for working in the Amazon EC2 console in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Required permissions for Resource Groups and Tag Editor

To use Resource Groups and Tag Editor, the following permissions must be added to a user's policy statement in IAM. You can add either AWS-managed policies that are maintained and kept up-to-date by AWS, or you can create and maintain your own custom policy.

Using AWS managed policies for Resource Groups and Tag Editor permissions

AWS Resource Groups and Tag Editor support the following AWS managed policies that you can use to provide a predefined set of permissions to your users. You can attach these managed policies to any user, role or group just as you would any other policy that you create.

ResourceGroupsandTagEditorReadOnlyAccess

This policy grants the attached IAM role or user permission to call the read-only operations for both Resource Groups and Tag Editor. To read a resource's tags, you must also have permissions for that resource through a separate policy (see the following Important note).

ResourceGroupsandTagEditorFullAccess

This policy grants the attached IAM role or user permission to call any Resource Groups operation and the read and write tag operations in Tag Editor. To read or write a resource's tags, you must also have permissions for that resource through a separate policy (see the following Important note).

Important

The two previous policies grant permission to call the Resource Groups and Tag Editor operations and use those consoles. For Resource Groups operations, those policies are sufficient and grant all the permissions needed to work with any resource in the Resource Groups console.

However, for tagging operations and the Tag Editor console, permissions are more granular. You must have permissions not only to invoke the operation, but also appropriate permissions to the specific resource whose tags you're trying to access. To grant that access to the tags, you must also attach one of the following policies:

  • The AWS-managed policy ReadOnlyAccess grants permissions to the read-only operations for every service's resources. AWS automatically keeps this policy up to date with new AWS services as they become available.

  • Many services provide a service-specific read-only AWS-managed policies that you can use to limit access to only the resources provided by that service. For example, Amazon EC2 provides AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess.

  • You could create your own policy that grants access to only the very specific read-only operations for the few services and resources you want your users to access. This policy use either an "allow list" strategy or a deny list strategy.

    An allow list strategy takes advantage of the fact that access is denied by default until you explicitly allow it in a policy. So you can use a policy like the following example:

    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [ "resource-groups:*" ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:resource-groups:*:123456789012:group/*"
        }
    ]
}

    Alternatively, you could use a "deny list" strategy that allows access to all resources except those that you explicitly block.

    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
             "Action": [ "resource-groups:*" ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:resource-groups:*:123456789012:group/*"
        }
    ]
}

Adding Resource Groups and Tag Editor permissions manually

  • resource-groups:* (This permission allows all Resource Groups actions. If you instead want to restrict actions that are available to a user, you can replace the asterisk with a specific Resource Groups action, or to a comma-separated list of actions)

  • cloudformation:DescribeStacks

  • cloudformation:ListStackResources

  • tag:GetResources

  • tag:TagResources

  • tag:UntagResources

  • tag:getTagKeys

  • tag:getTagValues

  • resource-explorer:*

Note

The resource-groups:SearchResources permission allows Tag Editor to list resources when you filter your search using tag keys or values.

The resource-explorer:ListResources permission allows Tag Editor to list resources when you search resources without defining search tags.

To use Resource Groups and Tag Editor in the console, you also need permission to run the resource-groups:ListGroupResources action. This permission is necessary for listing available resource types in the current Region. Using policy conditions with resource-groups:ListGroupResources is not currently supported.