ConfigurationRecorder

Changing the name of a configuration recorder

To change the name of the customer managed configuration recorder, you must delete it and create a new customer managed configuration recorder with a new name.

You cannot change the name of a service-linked configuration recorder.

High Number of AWS Config Evaluations

You might notice increased activity in your account during your initial month recording with AWS Config when compared to subsequent months. During the initial bootstrapping process, AWS Config runs evaluations on all the resources in your account that you have selected for AWS Config to record.

If you are running ephemeral workloads, you may see increased activity from AWS Config as it records configuration changes associated with creating and deleting these temporary resources. An ephemeral workload is a temporary use of computing resources that are loaded and run when needed. Examples include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, Amazon EMR jobs, and AWS Auto Scaling.

If you want to avoid the increased activity from running ephemeral workloads, you can set up the configuration recorder to exclude these resource types from being recorded, or run these types of workloads in a separate account with AWS Config turned off to avoid increased configuration recording and rule evaluations.

Some resource types require continuous recording

AWS Firewall Manager depends on continuous recording to monitor your resources. If you are using Firewall Manager, it is recommended that you set the recording frequency to Continuous.

The server will reject a request without a defined roleARN for the configuration recorder

While the API model does not require this field, the server will reject a request without a defined roleARN for the configuration recorder.

Policies and compliance results

IAM policies and other policies managed in AWS Organizations can impact whether AWS Config has permissions to record configuration changes for your resources. Additionally, rules directly evaluate the configuration of a resource and rules don't take into account these policies when running evaluations. Make sure that the policies in effect align with how you intend to use AWS Config.

Keep Minimum Permisions When Reusing an IAM role

If you use an AWS service that uses AWS Config, such as AWS Security Hub or AWS Control Tower, and an IAM role has already been created, make sure that the IAM role that you use when setting up AWS Config keeps the same minimum permissions as the pre-existing IAM role. You must do this to ensure that the other AWS service continues to run as expected.

For example, if AWS Control Tower has an IAM role that allows AWS Config to read S3 objects, make sure that the same permissions are granted to the IAM role you use when setting up AWS Config. Otherwise, it may interfere with how AWS Control Tower operates.

The service-linked IAM role for AWS Config must be used for service-linked configuration recorders

For service-linked configuration recorders, you must use the service-linked IAM role for AWS Config: AWSServiceRoleForConfig.