AWS Systems Manager and AWS Organizations

AWS Systems Manager is a collection of capabilities that enable visibility and control of your AWS resources. The following Systems Manager capabilities work with Organizations across all of the AWS accounts in your organization:

• Systems Manager Explorer, is a customizable operations dashboard that reports information about your AWS resources. You can synchronize operations data across all AWS accounts in your organization by using Organizations and Systems Manager Explorer. For more information, see Systems Manager Explorer in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

• Systems Manager Change Manager is an enterprise change management framework for requesting, approving, implementing, and reporting on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure. For more information, see AWS Systems Manager Change Manager in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

• Systems Manager OpsCenter provides a central location where operations engineers and IT professionals can view, investigate, and resolve operational work items (OpsItems) related to AWS resources. When you use OpsCenter with Organizations it supports working with OpsItems from a management account (either an Organizations management account or a Systems Manager delegated administrator account) and one other account during a single session. Once configured, users can perform the following types of actions:

  • Create, view, and update OpsItems in another account.

  • View detailed information about AWS resources that are specified in OpsItems in another account.

  • Start Systems Manager Automation runbooks to remediate issues with AWS resources in another account.

  For more information, see AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

Use the following information to help you integrate AWS Systems Manager with AWS Organizations.

Service-linked roles created when you enable integration

The following service-linked role is automatically created in your organization's management account when you enable trusted access. This role allows Systems Manager to perform supported operations within your organization's accounts in your organization.

You can delete or modify this role only if you disable trusted access between Systems Manager and Organizations, or if you remove the member account from the organization.

• AWSServiceRoleForAmazonSSM_AccountDiscovery

Service principals used by the service-linked roles

The service-linked role in the previous section can be assumed only by the service principals authorized by the trust relationships defined for the role. The service-linked roles used by Systems Manager grant access to the following service principals:

• ssm.amazonaws.com

Enabling trusted access with Systems Manager

For information about the permissions needed to enable trusted access, see Permissions required to enable trusted access.

You can enable trusted access using only the Organizations tools.

You can enable trusted access by using either the AWS Organizations console, by running a AWS CLI command, or by calling an API operation in one of the AWS SDKs.

AWS Management Console

To enable trusted service access using the Organizations console

1. Sign in to the AWS Organizations console. You must sign in as an IAM user, assume an IAM role, or sign in as the root user (not recommended) in the organization’s management account.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Services.

3. Choose AWS Systems Manager in the list of services.

4. Choose Enable trusted access.

5. In the Enable trusted access for AWS Systems Manager dialog box, type enable to confirm it, and then choose Enable trusted access.

6. If you are the administrator of only AWS Organizations, tell the administrator of AWS Systems Manager that they can now enable that service using its console to work with AWS Organizations.

AWS CLI, AWS API

To enable trusted service access using the OrganizationsCLI/SDK

You can use the following AWS CLI commands or API operations to enable trusted service access:

• AWS CLI: enable-aws-service-access

  You can run the following command to enable AWS Systems Manager as a trusted service with Organizations.

  $ aws organizations enable-aws-service-access \ 
      --service-principal ssm.amazonaws.com

  This command produces no output when successful.

• AWS API: EnableAWSServiceAccess

Disabling trusted access with Systems Manager

For information about the permissions needed to disable trusted access, see Permissions required to disable trusted access.

Systems Manager requires trusted access with AWS Organizations to synchronize operations data across AWS accounts in your organization. If you disable trusted access, then Systems Manager fails to synchronize operations data and reports an error.

You can disable trusted access using only the Organizations tools.

You can disable trusted access by using either the AWS Organizations console, by running an Organizations AWS CLI command, or by calling an Organizations API operation in one of the AWS SDKs.

AWS Management Console

To disable trusted service access using the Organizations console

1. Sign in to the AWS Organizations console. You must sign in as an IAM user, assume an IAM role, or sign in as the root user (not recommended) in the organization’s management account.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Services.

3. Choose AWS Systems Manager in the list of services.

4. Choose Disable trusted access.

5. In the Disable trusted access for AWS Systems Manager dialog box, type disable to confirm it, and then choose Disable trusted access.

6. If you are the administrator of only AWS Organizations, tell the administrator of AWS Systems Manager that they can now disable that service using its console or tools from working with AWS Organizations.

AWS CLI, AWS API

To disable trusted service access using the Organizations CLI/SDK

You can use the following AWS CLI commands or API operations to disable trusted service access:

• AWS CLI: disable-aws-service-access

  You can run the following command to disable AWS Systems Manager as a trusted service with Organizations.

  $ aws organizations disable-aws-service-access \
      --service-principal ssm.amazonaws.com

  This command produces no output when successful.

• AWS API: DisableAWSServiceAccess

Enabling a delegated administrator account for Systems Manager

When you designate a member account as a delegated administrator for the organization, users and roles from that account can perform administrative actions for Systems Manager that otherwise can be performed only by users or roles in the organization's management account. This helps you to separate management of the organization from management of Systems Manager.

If you use Change Manager across an organization, you use a delegated administrator account. This is the AWS account that has been designated as the account for managing change templates, change requests, change runbooks and approval workflows in Change Manager. The delegated account manages change activities across your organization. When you set up your organization for use with Change Manager, you specify which of your accounts serves in this role. It does not have to be the organization's management account. The delegated administrator account is not required if you use Change Manager with a single account only.

To designate a member account as a delegated administrator see the following topics in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide:

• For Explorer and OpsCenter, see Configuring a Delegated Administrator.

• For Change Manager, see Setting up an organization and delegated account for Change Manager.