Entering free-form text responses as manual evidence

You can provide additional context and supporting information for an assessment control by entering free-form text and saving that text as evidence. This allows you to manually document details that aren’t captured through automatic evidence collection.

For example, you can use Audit Manager to create custom controls that represent questions in a vendor risk assessment questionnaire. In this case, the name of each control is a specific question that asks for information about your organization’s security and compliance posture. To record your response to a given vendor risk assessment question, you can enter a text response and save it as manual evidence for the control.

Prerequisites

• When a control is inactive, you can't add manual evidence to that control. To add manual evidence, you must first change the control status to either under review or reviewed.

• Make sure your IAM identity has appropriate permissions to manage an assessment in AWS Audit Manager. Two suggested policies that grant these permissions are AWSAuditManagerAdministratorAccess and Allow users management access to AWS Audit Manager.

Procedure

You can enter text responses using the Audit Manager console, the Audit Manager API, or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

AWS console

To enter a text response on the Audit Manager console

1. Open the AWS Audit Manager console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/auditmanager/home.

2. In the left navigation pane, choose Assessments and then choose an assessment.

3. Choose the Controls tab, scroll down to Control sets and then choose a control.

4. From the Evidence folders tab, choose Add manual evidence.

5. Choose Enter text response.

6. In the pop-up window that appears, enter your response in plain text format.

7. Choose Confirm.

AWS CLI

In the following procedure, replace the placeholder text with your own information.

To enter a text response in the AWS CLI

1. Run the list-assessments command.

   aws auditmanager list-assessments

   In the response, find the assessment that you want to upload evidence to and take note of the assessment ID.

2. Run the get-assessment command and specify the assessment ID from step one.

   aws auditmanager get-assessment --assessment-id 1a2b3c4d-5e6f-7g8h-9i0j-0k1l2m3n4o5p

   In the response, find the control set and control that you want to upload evidence to, and take note of their IDs.

3. Run the batch-import-evidence-to-assessment-control command with the following parameters:

   • --assessment-id – Use the assessment ID from step one.

   • --control-set-id – Use the control set ID from step two.

   • --control-id – Use the control ID from step two.

   • --manual-evidence – Use textResponse as the manual evidence type and enter the text that you want to save as manual evidence.

   aws auditmanager batch-import-evidence-to-assessment-control --assessment-id 1a2b3c4d-5e6f-7g8h-9i0j-0k1l2m3n4o5p --control-set-id ControlSet --control-id a1b2c3d4-e5f6-g7h8-i9j0-k1l2m3n4o5p6 --manual-evidence textResponse="enter text here"

Audit Manager API

To enter a text response using the API

1. Call the ListAssessments operation. In the response, find the assessment that you want to upload evidence to and take note of the assessment ID.

2. Call the GetAssessment operation and specify the assessmentId from step one. In the response, find the control set and control that you want to upload evidence to, and take note of their IDs.

3. Call the BatchImportEvidenceToAssessmentControl operation with the following parameters:

   • assessmentId – Use the assessment ID from step one.

   • controlSetId – Use the control set ID from step two.

   • controlId – Use the control ID from step two.

   • manualEvidence – Use textResponse as the manual evidence type and enter the text that you want to save as manual evidence.

For more information, choose any of the links in the previous procedure to read more in the AWS Audit Manager API Reference. This includes information about how to use these operations and parameters in one of the language-specific AWS SDKs.

Next steps

After you've collected and reviewed the evidence for your assessment, you can generate an assessment report. For more information, see Preparing an assessment report in AWS Audit Manager.