AWS Athena Prerequisites

Configuring your AWS Athena destination.

Prerequisites

  • By default, Athena authentication uses role-based access. You will need the following trust policy to grant access to the data-syncing service:
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity"
      ],
      "Principal": {
        "Federated": "accounts.google.com"
      },
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "accounts.google.com:sub": "109570679157784085515"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Step 1: Create a destination bucket, service policy, and user

Create Athena target bucket

Follow these steps to create a bucket to be used for staging data before transferring to a destination.

  1. Navigate to the S3 service page.
  2. Click Create bucket.
  3. Enter a Bucket name, select an AWS Region, and modify any of the default settings as desired. Note: Object Ownership can be set to "ACLs disabled" and Block Public Access settings for this bucket can be set to "Block all public access" as recommended by AWS. Make note of the Bucket name and AWS Region.
  4. Click Create bucket.

Create Athena access policy

  1. Navigate to the IAM service page, click on the Policies navigation tab, and click Create policy.
  2. Click the JSON tab, and paste the following policy, being sure to replace BUCKET and SCHEMA with the name of the buckets and database/schema/folder where Athena should write the data. BUCKET should refer to the bucket created in the previous step. Note: the SCHEMA used below does not need to be created ahead of time. If it does not exist, it will be created automatically before transferring data.
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "AllowAthenaAccess",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "athena:*",
            "Resource": "*"
        },
        {
            "Sid": "AllowGlueAccessToDestinationDatabaseAndTables",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "glue:GetDatabases",
                "glue:GetDatabase",
                "glue:GetTables",
                "glue:GetTable",
                "glue:GetPartitions",
                "glue:CreateTable",
                "glue:CreateDatabase",
                "glue:UpdateTable",
                "glue:DeleteTable"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:glue:*:239674069128:catalog",
                "arn:aws:glue:*:239674069128:database/SCHEMA",
                "arn:aws:glue:*:239674069128:database/default",
                "arn:aws:glue:*:239674069128:table/SCHEMA/*"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "AllowS3AccessToBucket",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:DeleteObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET",
                "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Athena vs. S3 permissions

Because Athena uses S3 as the underlying storage layer, the Resource access requested in the policy is scoped down via resource-specific permissions in the S3 actions.

Schema vs. Database

During destination onboarding, you will be asked to provide both a "schema" and a "database". Though those are mostly synonymous in Athena, they are used for two different purposes here:

  • schema should be the name of the folder in S3 under which the final data will be written.
  • database should be the name of the folder in S3 in which the Athena query results are written (i.e., the automatically generated athena_output/ data).
  1. Click through to the Review step, choose a name for the policy, for example, transfer-service-policy (this will be referenced in the next step), add a description, and click Create policy.

Create role

  1. Navigate to the IAM service page.
  2. Navigate to the Roles navigation tab, and click Create role.
  3. Select Custom trust policy and paste the provided trust policy (from the prerequisite) to allow AssumeRole access to this role. Click Next.
  4. Add the permissions policy created above, and click Next.
  5. Enter a Role name, for example, transfer-role, and click Create role.
  6. Once successfully created, search for the created role in the Roles list, click the role name, and make a note of the ARN value.

Step 2: Gather the required setup information

  1. For the data export setup you will need:
    • database and schema
    • workgroup
    • bucket name
    • bucket region
    • IAM Role ARN

Visit the LogRocket Streaming Data Export settings page to complete the setup.


What’s Next

Learn about how to configure the Streaming Data Export integration in app!