How AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to Incident Manager, learn what IAM features are available to use with Incident Manager.

To get a high-level view of how Incident Manager and other AWS services work with most IAM features, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Incident Manager doesn't support policies that deny access to resources shared using AWS RAM.

Identity-based policies for Incident Manager

Supports identity-based policies: Yes

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

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. You can't specify the principal in an identity-based policy because it applies to the user or role to which it is attached. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Incident Manager

To view examples of Incident Manager identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager.

Resource-based policies within Incident Manager

Supports resource-based policies: Yes

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services.

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, an IAM administrator in the trusted account must also grant the principal entity (user or role) permission to access the resource. They 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 Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

The Incident Manager service supports only two types of resource-based policies called using either the AWS RAM console or the PutResourcePolicy action, which is attached to a response plan or contact. This policy defines which principals can perform actions on the response plans, contacts, escalation plans, and incidents. Incident Manager uses resource based policies to share resources across accounts.

Incident Manager doesn't support policies that deny access to resources shared using AWS RAM.

To learn how to attach a resource-based policy to a response plan or contact, see Managing incidents across AWS accounts and Regions in Incident Manager.

Resource-based policy examples within Incident Manager

To view examples of Incident Manager resource-based policies, see Resource-based policy examples for AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager.

Policy actions for Incident Manager

Supports policy actions: Yes

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.

To see a list of Incident Manager actions, see Actions defined by AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Incident Manager use the following prefixes before the action:

ssm-incidents
ssm-contacts

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

"Action": [
      "ssm-incidents:GetResponsePlan",
      "ssm-contacts:GetContact"
         ]

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

"Action": "ssm-incidents:Get*"

To view examples of Incident Manager identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager.

Incident Manager uses actions in two different namespaces, ssm-incidents and ssm-contacts. When creating policies for Incident Manager make sure to use the namespace correct for the action. SSM-Incidents is used for response plan and incident related action. SSM-Contacts is used for actions related to contacts and contact engagement. For example:

Policy resources for Incident Manager

Supports policy resources: Yes

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": "*"

To see a list of Incident Manager resource types and their ARNs, see Resources defined by AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions defined by AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager.

To view examples of Incident Manager identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager.

Incident Manager resources are used to create incidents, collaborate in chat channels, resolve incidents, and engage responders. If a user has access to a response plan they have access to all incidents created from it. If a user has access to a contact or escalation plan they can engage the contact or contacts in the escalation plan.

Policy condition keys for Incident Manager

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: No

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.

Access control lists (ACLs) in Incident Manager

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with Incident Manager

Supports ABAC (tags in policies): No

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes. In AWS, these attributes are called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities (users or roles) and to many AWS resources. Tagging entities and resources is the first step of ABAC. Then you design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource that they are trying to access.

ABAC is helpful in environments that are growing rapidly and helps with situations where policy management becomes cumbersome.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

Using temporary credentials with Incident Manager

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Some AWS services don't work when you sign in using temporary credentials. For additional information, including which AWS services work with temporary credentials, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

You are using temporary credentials if you sign in to the AWS Management Console using any method except a user name and password. For example, when you access AWS using your company's single sign-on (SSO) link, that process automatically creates temporary credentials. You also automatically create temporary credentials when you sign in to the console as a user and then switch roles. For more information about switching roles, see Switch from a user to an IAM role (console) in the IAM User Guide.

You can manually create temporary credentials using the AWS CLI or AWS API. You can then use those temporary credentials to access AWS. AWS recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM.

Cross-service principal permissions for Incident Manager

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): Yes

When you use an IAM user or role to perform actions in AWS, you are considered a principal. When you use some services, you might perform an action that then initiates another action in a different service. FAS uses the permissions of the principal calling an AWS service, combined with the requesting AWS service to make requests to downstream services. FAS requests are only made when a service receives a request that requires interactions with other AWS services or resources to complete. In this case, you must have permissions to perform both actions. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Incident Manager

Supports service roles: Yes

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Create a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service in the IAM User Guide.

Choosing an IAM role in Incident Manager

When you create a response plan resource in Incident Manager, you must choose a role to allow Incident Manager to run a Systems Manager automation document on your behalf. If you have previously created a service role or service-linked role, then Incident Manager provides you with a list of roles to choose from. It's important to choose a role that allows access to run your automation document instances. For more information, see Integrating Systems Manager Automation runbooks in Incident Manager for incident remediation. When you create a Amazon Q Developer in chat applications chat channel to be used during an incident you can select a service role that allows you to use commands directly from chat. To learn more about creating chat channels for incident collaboration, see Creating and integrating chat channels for responders in Incident Manager. To learn more about IAM policies in Amazon Q Developer in chat applications, see Managing permissions for running commands using Amazon Q Developer in chat applications in the Amazon Q Developer in chat applications Administrator guide.

Service-linked roles for Incident Manager

Supports service-linked roles: Yes

A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an AWS service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your AWS account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

For information about creating or managing Incident Manager service-linked roles, see Using service-linked roles for Incident Manager.