Troubleshooting Amazon Kendra Identity and Access

Use the following information to help you diagnose and fix common issues that you might encounter when working with Amazon Kendra and IAM.

I am not authorized to perform an action in Amazon Kendra

If the AWS Management Console tells you that you're not authorized to perform an action, then you must contact your administrator for assistance. Your administrator is the person that provided you with your sign-in credentials.

The following example error occurs when the mateojackson user tries to use the console to view details about an index but does not have kendra:DescribeIndex permissions.

User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/mateojackson is not authorized to perform: kendra:DescribeIndex on resource: index ARN

In this case, Mateo asks his administrator to update his policies to allow him to access the index resource using the kendra:DescribeIndex action.

I am not authorized to perform iam:PassRole

If you receive an error that you're not authorized to perform the iam:PassRole action, your policies must be updated to allow you to pass a role to Amazon Kendra.

Some AWS services allow you to pass an existing role to that service instead of creating a new service role or service-linked role. To do this, you must have permissions to pass the role to the service.

The following example error occurs when an IAM user named marymajor tries to use the console to perform an action in Amazon Kendra. However, the action requires the service to have permissions that are granted by a service role. Mary does not have permissions to pass the role to the service.

User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/marymajor is not authorized to perform: iam:PassRole

In this case, Mary's policies must be updated to allow her to perform the iam:PassRole action.

If you need help, contact your AWS administrator. Your administrator is the person who provided you with your sign-in credentials.

I'm an administrator and I want to allow others to access Amazon Kendra

To allow others to access Amazon Kendra, you must grant permission to the people or applications that need access. If you are using AWS IAM Identity Center to manage people and applications, you assign permission sets to users or groups to define their level of access. Permission sets automatically create and assign IAM policies to IAM roles that are associated with the person or application. For more information, see Permission sets in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

If you are not using IAM Identity Center, you must create IAM entities (users or roles) for the people or applications that need access. You must then attach a policy to the entity that grants them the correct permissions in Amazon Kendra. After the permissions are granted, provide the credentials to the user or application developer. They will use those credentials to access AWS. To learn more about creating IAM users, groups, policies, and permissions, see IAM Identities and Policies and permissions in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

I want to allow people outside of my AWS account to access my Amazon Kendra resources

You can create a role that users in other accounts or people outside of your organization can use to access your resources. You can specify who is trusted to assume the role. For services that support resource-based policies or access control lists (ACLs), you can use those policies to grant people access to your resources.

To learn more, consult the following:

• To learn whether Amazon Kendra supports these features, see How Amazon Kendra works with IAM.

• To learn how to provide access to your resources across AWS accounts that you own, see Providing access to an IAM user in another AWS account that you own in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn how to provide access to your resources to third-party AWS accounts, see Providing access to AWS accounts owned by third parties in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn how to provide access through identity federation, see Providing access to externally authenticated users (identity federation) in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn the difference between using roles and resource-based policies for cross-account access, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.