Amazon Web Services connector

The connector requires the following information to connect to AWS and collect data:

• S3 bucket name
• Name of the daily billing report and its prefix
• Access key and secret key of the IAM account created

To fetch these details, complete the following preconfiguration tasks. If you have multiple AWS accounts, the owner of the master AWS account must perform the preconfiguration tasks.

You must configure the connector to connect to Amazon Web Services for collecting the cost and usage data of AWS services.

To configure the connector:

1. In the BMC Helix Cloud Cost dashboard, navigate to Connectors > Add a Connector > and select AWS Cloud Connector from the cloud based connectors.

   1. On the Configure Connector page, configure the following properties:

      Property	Description
      Connector name	A unique name for the connector.
      AWS configuration	Specify whether you want to import data from the AWS GovCloud (US) account. The default selection is a standard AWS account.
      AWS account access key	Specify the access key ID of the IAM user that you have created. For example, a typical access key ID looks like: AMAZONACSKEYID007EXAMPLE. To get the AWS account access key: Open the IAM console and sign in with your AWS account credentials: https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/ Click Users > select your user name. Click Security > Credentials tab > Access key section. Specify the AWS Account Secret Key for the account to be scanned. This key plays the role of a password.

2. Collection mode: By default, the data collection cycle is set to On Demand collection. You can select an appropriate unit of time (days, minutes, hours) to schedule the data collection frequency along with event driven collection cycle where the collection is triggered when an event is identified in the selected account.

3. On the Select Policies page, select the policies that you want to import from the policy library. This option is available only if you are licensed to use BMC Helix Cloud Security. For more information, see Managing policies.

4. Click Continue. A confirmation message about the request for data collection processing is displayed.
   The Manage Connectors page shows the details of the newly configured AWS Cloud Connector.

Verify that the connector ran successfully and check whether the AWS data is refreshed on the Dashboard.

To verify whether the connector ran successfully:

1. On the Manage Connectors page, the state of the newly configured connector is updated to Running.
   When you run the connector for the first time, the connector recovers data for the past 6 months. The data collection begins immediately but depending on the number of resources in your environment the data is displayed after some time in BMC Helix Cloud Cost.
2. On the BMC Helix Cloud Cost dashboard, the AWS connector tab is displayed.
3. Select the AWS tab from the Dashboard.
4. In the Summary tab, verify that the total cost, historical cost, and total resources are displayed. Also, Recommendations are displayed only when you have configured the connector to collect utilization data and you have efficiency issues in your infrastructure. Recommendations are not generated if all the resources are utilized efficiently.
5. Resource pool information is not available by default. You must create a resource pool to view the resource pool details like name, resource count, budget, actual cost, and the projected cost. To create a resource pool, click Manage Resource Pools.
6. In the Accounts tab, verify that the account details like name, actual cost, change in cost (in US dollars and percent), percent total cost, and number of resources are displayed for the accounts you own.
7. In the Services tab, verify that the service details like name, actual cost, change in cost (in US dollars and percent), percent total cost, and number of resources are displayed.
8. In the Explore Bill tab, verify that the resource name, actual cost, resource type, region, account name, and the service name are displayed.