How AWS Health works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to AWS Health, you should understand what IAM features are available to use with AWS Health. To get a high-level view of how AWS Health and other AWS services work with IAM, see AWS Services That Work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

AWS Health identity-based policies

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. AWS Health supports specific actions, resources, and condition keys. To learn about all of the elements that you use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON Policy Elements Reference in the IAM User Guide.

Actions

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Policy actions usually have the same name as the associated AWS API operation. There are some exceptions, such as permission-only actions that don't have a matching API operation. There are also some operations that require multiple actions in a policy. These additional actions are called dependent actions.

Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

Policy actions in AWS Health use the following prefix before the action: health:. For example, to grant someone permission to view detailed information about specified events with the DescribeEventDetails API operation, you include the heath:DescribeEventDetails action in the policy.

Policy statements must include an Action or NotAction element. AWS Health defines its own set of actions that describe tasks that you can perform with this service.

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas as follows.

"Action": [
      "health:action1",
      "health:action2"

You can specify multiple actions using wildcards (*). For example, to specify all actions that begin with the word Describe, include the following action.

"Action": "health:Describe*"

To see a list of AWS Health actions, see Actions Defined by AWS Health in the IAM User Guide.

Resources

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. Statements must include either a Resource or a NotResource element. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You can do this for actions that support a specific resource type, known as resource-level permissions.

For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, such as listing operations, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

An AWS Health event has the following Amazon Resource Name (ARN) format.

arn:${Partition}:health:*::event/service/event-type-code/event-ID

For example, to specify the EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED_ABC123-DEF456 event in your statement, use the following ARN.

"Resource": "arn:aws:health:*::event/EC2/EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED/EC2_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED_ABC123-DEF456"

To specify all AWS Health events for Amazon EC2 that belong to a specific account, use the wildcard (*).

"Resource": "arn:aws:health:*::event/EC2/*/*"

For more information about the format of ARNs, see Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS Service Namespaces.

Some AWS Health actions can't be performed on a specific resource. In those cases, you must use the wildcard (*).

"Resource": "*"

AWS Health API operations can involve multiple resources. For example, the DescribeEvents operation returns information about events that meet a specified filter criteria. This means that an IAM user must have permissions to view this event.

To specify multiple resources in a single statement, separate the ARNs with commas.

"Resource": [
      "resource1",
      "resource2"

AWS Health supports only resource-level permissions for health events and only for the DescribeAffectedEntities and DescribeEventDetails API operations. For more information, see Resource- and action-based conditions.

To see a list of AWS Health resource types and their ARNs, see Resources Defined by AWS Health in the IAM User Guide. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions Defined by AWS Health.

Condition keys

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element (or Condition block) lets you specify conditions in which a statement is in effect. The Condition element is optional. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request.

If you specify multiple Condition elements in a statement, or multiple keys in a single Condition element, AWS evaluates them using a logical AND operation. If you specify multiple values for a single condition key, AWS evaluates the condition using a logical OR operation. All of the conditions must be met before the statement's permissions are granted.

You can also use placeholder variables when you specify conditions. For example, you can grant an IAM user permission to access a resource only if it is tagged with their IAM user name. For more information, see IAM policy elements: variables and tags in the IAM User Guide.

AWS supports global condition keys and service-specific condition keys. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

AWS Health defines its own set of condition keys and also supports using some global condition keys. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS Global Condition Context Keys in the IAM User Guide.

The DescribeAffectedEntities and DescribeEventDetails API operations support the health:eventTypeCode and health:service condition keys.

To see a list of AWS Health condition keys, see Condition Keys for AWS Health in the IAM User Guide. To learn with which actions and resources you can use a condition key, see Actions Defined by AWS Health.

Examples

To view examples of AWS Health identity-based policies, see AWS Health identity-based policy examples.

AWS Health resource-based policies

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that specify what actions a specified principal can perform on the AWS Health resource and under what conditions. AWS Health supports resource-based permissions policies for health events. Resource-based policies let you grant usage permission to other accounts on a per-resource basis. You can also use a resource-based policy to allow an AWS service to access your AWS Health events.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. Adding a cross-account principal to a resource-based policy is only half of establishing the trust relationship. When the principal and the resource are in different AWS accounts, you must also grant the principal entity permission to access the resource. Grant permission by attaching an identity-based policy to the entity. However, if a resource-based policy grants access to a principal in the same account, no additional identity-based policy is required. For more information, see How IAM Roles Differ from Resource-based Policies in the IAM User Guide.

AWS Health supports only resource-based policies for the DescribeAffectedEntities and DescribeEventDetails API operations. You can specify these actions in a policy to define which principal entities (accounts, users, roles, and federated users) can perform actions on the AWS Health event.

Examples

To view examples of AWS Health resource-based policies, see Resource- and action-based conditions.

Authorization based on AWS Health tags

AWS Health doesn't support tagging resources or controlling access based on tags.

AWS Health IAM roles

An IAM role is an entity within your AWS account that has specific permissions.

Using temporary credentials with AWS Health

You can use temporary credentials to sign in with federation, assume an IAM role, or to assume a cross-account role. You obtain temporary security credentials by calling AWS STS API operations such as AssumeRole or GetFederationToken.

AWS Health supports using temporary credentials.

Service-linked roles

Service-linked roles allow AWS services to access resources in other services to complete an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your IAM account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

AWS Health supports service-linked roles to integrate with AWS Organizations. The service-linked role is named AWSServiceRoleForHealth_Organizations. Attached to the role is the Health_OrganizationsServiceRolePolicy AWS managed policy. The AWS managed policy allows AWS Health to access health events from other AWS accounts in the organization.

You can use the EnableHealthServiceAccessForOrganization operation to create the service-linked role in the account. However, if you want to disable this feature, you must first call the DisableHealthServiceAccessForOrganization operation. You can then delete the role through the IAM console, IAM API, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). For more information, see Using service-linked roles in the IAM User Guide.

For more information, see Aggregating AWS Health events across accounts.

Service roles

This feature allows a service to assume a service role on your behalf. This role allows the service to access resources in other services to complete an action on your behalf. Service roles appear in your IAM account and are owned by the account. This means that an IAM administrator can change the permissions for this role. However, doing so might break the functionality of the service.

AWS Health doesn't support service roles.