Amazon EC2 Reports

Description

----- THE PROBLEM ----
One of the most FRUSTRATING things about using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has been the lack of information visibility.

Administrators are constantly switching AWS Screens to understand:

- WHAT has been created,
- WHERE in the World is is located,
- WHAT is connected to it,
- WHAT Security Groups are Attached,
- WHAT Public/Private IP Addresses are Associated,
- IS IT EVEN RUNNING?!

This has ALWAYS been painful "hunt-and-peck" navigation process to anyone who just wants an immediate summary of their EC2 information in an easy to understand format (like a Google Sheet) - without spending thousands of dollars for enterprise level tools that have their own way of presenting information.

As Dev-Ops, we have MANUALLY maintained a spreadsheet of the above information.

This has ALWAYS been a distraction from our day when we discovered that it was NOT kept up-to-date. When someone would discover a problem, we would be forced to re-cataloging of EVERYTHING to make sure our spreadsheet was up-to-date again. This wasted a lot of time and money over the years, and caused problems in some meetings when things were not accurate.



----- THE SOLUTION ----
This Add-on started as an internal tool to help us more easily capture and report our own AWS EC2 Metadata and report it to a Google Sheet that we could internally use.

The more we used it, the more we felt this was useful to other AWS EC2 users who would appreciate the same reporting capability.

So we polished this reporting application a bit more, streamlined the interface and workflows, and have made it available for purchase.

We KNOW you will find this VERY handy and useful for quickly getting a summary of your EC2 Instances.


---- SECURITY ----
This Add-on ONLY works with an Amazon Identity Management (IAM) Group and User Account Credentials.

NOTE: -->YOU<-- are RESPONSIBLE for YOUR OWN SECURITY when using this Add-on. (period).

The nice thing about IAM Security, YOU *ARE* IN CONTROL over access permissions. This means you can use this Add-on with complete confidence and get every benefit you expect from it.

Instructions are provided within the Add-on for how to set up your Group and User Permissions in IAM. But here is a summary of the READ ONLY settings we recommend:

- Group Policy Definition:
AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess
AmazonEC2ReportsAccess

- Group User:
Access Type: Programmatic

We do recommend you create a unique group and user for this Add-on and rotate your security keys regularly (duh).



---- ENHANCEMENTS ---
As with every cloud solution and integration, the weakest areas will limit the truly amazing stuff from being accomplished. We would love to see additional formatting capabilities with this Add-on, but Google is not yet there. We can do some - but the speed suffers due to Google Sheets-API limitations, not us. Hopefully we Google Sheets-API gets better, we will be able to add other nice features to this report.

We are always looking for good suggestions and feedback! If you have any that makes this product better, send it over. Please understand we are limited by the various APIs we have available.

Depending on the response, we may offer a "PRO" version of this Add-on that is more user configurable. The default reporting should be VERY USEFUL for most situations.


---- DISCLAIMER ----
We are not affiliated with Amazon or Google, and references to their products, technology, logos or other marks are are the exclusive ownership of their respective companies. This Add-on uses APIs created and managed by Amazon and Google respectively and are made available at NO COST to this developer to use for this purpose.


---- ABOUT US ----
We make some cool stuff... If you ever have a need for product recommendation management - look us up!

IF YOU LIKE OR LOVE THIS ADD-ON -- VOTE IT UP!! :)