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How to Connect AWS

5 min read Integrations

Connect your AWS account to Nova to automatically discover and monitor EC2 instances, Lambda functions, RDS databases, ECS containers, S3 buckets, and 40+ other AWS services.

System Status

Steps

1

Go to Integrations

Navigate to Settings > Integrations and find the AWS tile. Click Connect.

2

Create an IAM role

Nova uses a cross-account IAM role for secure, read-only access. Click Launch CloudFormation Stack to create the role automatically, or create it manually with this policy:

{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [{ "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "cloudwatch:GetMetricData", "cloudwatch:ListMetrics", "ec2:Describe*", "rds:Describe*", "lambda:List*", "ecs:Describe*", "tag:GetResources" ], "Resource": "*" }] }
3

Enter the role ARN

Copy the IAM role ARN from the CloudFormation output and paste it into Nova. Click Validate to confirm the connection.

4

Select services to monitor

Choose which AWS services to import. By default, Nova enables EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS, and S3. You can toggle additional services at any time.

5

Configure metric collection

Set the polling interval (default: 5 minutes) and select which CloudWatch namespaces to import. Nova deduplicates metrics if you also have the agent installed on EC2 instances.

Tip:

Enable AWS Cost Monitoring to track spending alongside performance metrics. This helps correlate cost spikes with traffic changes.

6

Verify in the dashboard

Within 5 minutes, your AWS resources will appear on the Infrastructure page. Nova automatically creates a service map showing how your AWS services connect.

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