AWS Billing Dashboard Access as IAM user
Usually the first step after setting up the AWS account is to set up users and groups and attach appropriate policies to the groups. And AWS discourages us to use the root user. So what I did is create myself an IAM user and provided `AdministratorAccess`. I did the following steps in IAM console.
- Created an IAM User named ‘developer’
- Created a group named ‘DeveloperGroup’.
- Assign the policy ‘AdministratorAccess’ to the group created in Step 2.
Now I am ready to login as the IAM user. I signed out as the root user and sign in to the AWS console as the user ‘developer’. Great !!! So far going good.
Now, I wanted to set billing preferences and set some billing alerts. When I navigated to the billing dashboard, I saw the error message as below.
Something is not right. ok. Let me click on these links provided in the error message to fix it. Huh.. It lead me to a verbose documentation which in turn linked to another page. Oh no…
AWS does not allow IAM users to view the billing dashboard by default even with `Administrator Access`.
I don’t know why.( Probably since most IAM users are only meant to access resources and not meant for viewing billing). Instead of redirecting to the documentation, I would rather have my solution listed right there in the error message.
So the solution is simple. I logged in as account owner (with root email address) and navigated to the billing dashboard and activate the following config.
Once it is activated, sign out as root user and sign in as IAM user (developer). Finally, I am able to see the dashboard.
