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Amazon S3

Overview

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, and highly-scalable cloud storage.

NOTE: This data source is available for accounts on the Basic and Professional plans.

How to Connect

Before you get started you will need to obtain your Amazon S3 Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and Bucket (which is optional).

Here are the steps to connect your Amazon S3 account to Grow:

  1. Log in to your Grow account and click Add Metric. Select Amazon S3 from the list of data sources, then select Connect.
  2. To connect your Amazon S3 account, you will need to enter your Connection Name, Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and Bucket (which is optional)
  3. For the Connection Name field, enter a name that you want Grow to remember. The name you enter is what your connection will be called after you press Submit.
  4. In Amazon, you’ll need to create an IAM user in your AWS account. You can find instructions here on their help documentation.
  5. When you create the new user, you will need to create credentials for this user, which includes an Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key. Copy these values into Grow.
    • NOTE: Before you finish creating the user, you will only have one chance to view the Access Key ID and secret access keys. You can click “Download .csv” to save the file with the keys if you need to see it later. After you have passed this step, you will not be able to see the access keys again.
  6. Make sure that the new IAM User has Programmatic Access, as they will need to access the API.
  7. You’ll need to attach permissions to this IAM user. We recommend simply attaching the “S3ReadOnly” policy to the user; this is usually the easiest. This document will walk you through attaching managed policies to an IAM user.
  8. If you know which bucket your IAM user needs access to, you are welcome to use our policy, which is below in the FAQ + Tips and Tricks section, to give the user access to the specific bucket. Additionally, you can check out Amazon's help article for further documentation.
  9. While specifying a bucket is optional, if you know the bucket the IAM user needs access to, we recommend specifying it.
  10. Once you have this set up, go ahead and copy the access key ID, the secret access key, your connection name, and the bucket (if you have it) into Grow. Press Submit.

And that's it! You are good to go.

Endpoints

Amazon S3 is an integration similar to FTP/SFTP in that it has no set endpoints. Instead, when you connect to Amazon S3, you will be able to pull in the folders and reports you have saved there. Any time your files in Amazon S3 are updated, Grow will automatically update the metrics built on them.

FAQs + Tips and Tricks

How can I make sure my data is secure?

We have several items in place to keep your data safe. Check out our security article to see what steps you can take to keep control of your data.

It says my file is too big?

Most files must be smaller than 15 MB in order to successfully pull them into Grow. Under some extenuating circumstances, our support teams can make exceptions for Box files up to 50 MB.

What file formats does Grow support?

XLS, XLSX, XLSM, and CSV. If you're looking to use JSON or XML files, Grow can pull those in, but we suggest converting to a CSV first.

Why am I only seeing one sheet/tab?

For Excel-based files, you can select 1 sheet at a time. So if you have an Excel doc with multiple sheets, you need to create a dataset for each sheet

Have uniquely named headers.

If there isn’t a unique column header in your chart, we can’t add the data to your dataset. Additionally, it will cause problems using Grows transform pipeline and any SQL functions. For example, if there are two columns called Date, and you only want to track 30 days back, Grow isn’t able to distinguish which date column to apply the filter to. It’s best if the columns were renamed to be more descriptive such as Start Date and End Date.

Make sure your file is properly formatted.

Find some helpful tips on spreadsheet formatting in Grow here.

Bucket Permissions for IAM User

If you want to isolate permissions to a specific bucket, you can create and attach this policy to your IAM user. Where it says YOUR_BUCKET_NAME_HERE, you would insert the name of the bucket.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:Get*",
                "s3:List*"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME_HERE/*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR_BUCKET_NAME_HERE"
        }
    ]
}

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