Welcome

These interfaces allow you to apply the AWS library of pre-defined controls to your organizational units, programmatically. In AWS Control Tower, the terms "control" and "guardrail" are synonyms.

To call these APIs, you'll need to know:

• the controlIdentifier for the control--or guardrail--you are targeting.

• the ARN associated with the target organizational unit (OU), which we call the targetIdentifier.

• the ARN associated with a resource that you wish to tag or untag.

To get the controlIdentifier for your AWS Control Tower control:

The controlIdentifier is an ARN that is specified for each control. You can view the controlIdentifier in the console on the Control details page, as well as in the documentation.

The controlIdentifier is unique in each AWS Region for each control. You can find the controlIdentifier for each Region and control in the Tables of control metadata in the AWS Control Tower User Guide.

A quick-reference list of control identifers for the AWS Control Tower legacy Strongly recommended and Elective controls is given in Resource identifiers for APIs and controls in the Controls reference guide section of the AWS Control Tower User Guide. Remember that Mandatory controls cannot be added or removed.

Note

ARN format: arn:aws:controltower:{REGION}::control/{CONTROL_NAME}

Example:

arn:aws:controltower:us-west-2::control/AWS-GR_AUTOSCALING_LAUNCH_CONFIG_PUBLIC_IP_DISABLED

To get the targetIdentifier:

The targetIdentifier is the ARN for an OU.

In the AWS Organizations console, you can find the ARN for the OU on the Organizational unit details page associated with that OU.

Note

OU ARN format:

arn:${Partition}:organizations::${MasterAccountId}:ou/o-${OrganizationId}/ou-${OrganizationalUnitId}

Details and examples

• Control API input and output examples with CLI

• Enable controls with CloudFormation

• Control metadata tables

• List of identifiers for legacy controls

• Controls reference guide

• Controls library groupings

• Creating AWS Control Tower resources with AWS CloudFormation

To view the open source resource repository on GitHub, see aws-cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-resource-providers-controltower

Recording API Requests

AWS Control Tower supports AWS CloudTrail, a service that records AWS API calls for your AWS account and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. By using information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine which requests the AWS Control Tower service received, who made the request and when, and so on. For more about AWS Control Tower and its support for CloudTrail, see Logging AWS Control Tower Actions with AWS CloudTrail in the AWS Control Tower User Guide. To learn more about CloudTrail, including how to turn it on and find your log files, see the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

This document was last published on December 8, 2023.