How-to : Use Teevity for Amazon cloud costs monitoring with a read-only IAM user

As we explained a few days ago, Amazon has just announced a new feature of their Amazon Identity and Access management system (aka Amazon IAM).

You can now create IAM users with restricted rights that only have access to the Account Activity and Usage Report pages of the AWS portal, the one that give you information about your current costs.

      

These pages are the ones parsed by some AWS cloud costs monitoring solutions (the ones that do comprehensive and precise AWS cost reporting vs estimations), along-side other sources of information.
 

Here is the 3 steps configuration process. It’s only 2 minutes !

• Step 1 - Enable access to the Billing page 
• Step 2 - Create an IAM group dedicated to Cloud cost monitoring
• Step 3 - Create a new IAM user and add it to the group

You now have a “user/password” you can safely share with a third party AWS Cloud costs monitoring tool like Teevity Cloud costs analytics.

And you’re also pretty close to seeing these kind of charts on your Teevity dashboard.

        

And you can also use our graphical Widget on your desktop.