Adding a DynamoDB Connection

Prerequisites

• A user with sufficient permissions is required to establish a connection with DynamoDB.
• Zeenea traffic flows towards the data source must be open.

note

A link to the configuration template is available from this page: Zeenea Connector Downloads.

Supported Versions

The DynamoDB connector was developed and tested with the web version of the product.

Installing the Plugin

The AWS plugin can be downloaded here: Zeenea Connector Downloads.

For more information on how to install a plugin, please refer to the following article: Installing and Configuring Connectors as a Plugin.

Declaring the Connection

Creating and configuring connectors is done through a dedicated configuration file located in the /connections folder of the relevant scanner.

Read more: Managing Connections

In order to establish a connection with a DynamoDB instance, specifying the following parameters in the dedicated file is required:

Parameter	Expected value
name	The name that will be displayed to catalog users for this connection.
code	The unique identifier of the connection on the Zeenea platform. Once registered on the platform, this code must not be modified or the connection will be considered as new and the old one removed from the scanner.
connector_id	The type of connector to be used for the connection. Here, the value must be aws-dynamodb and this value must not be modified.
Optional, can be determined from the EC2 configuration
connection.aws.url	Database DynamoDB address
connection.aws.profile	AWS profile
connection.aws.access_key_id	AWS key identifier
connection.aws.secret_access_key	AWS secret access key
connection.aws.region	AWS region
connection.fetch_page_size	(Advanced) define the size of batch of items loaded by each request in inventory
Sampling
schema_analysis.enable	Enable data sample in order to complete dataset fields. Default value is false.
schema_analysis.sample_size	Number of items retrieve for data sample. Default value is 1000.
Certificate & Proxy
tls.truststore.path	The Trust Store file path. This file must be provided in case TLS encryption is activated (protocol https) and when certificates of servers are delivered by a specific authority. It must contain the certification chain.
tls.truststore.password	Password of the trust store file
tls.truststore.type	Type of the trust store file. (PKCS12 or JKS). Default value is discovered from the file extension.
proxy.scheme	Depending on the proxy, http or https
proxy.hostname	Proxy address
proxy.port	Proxy port
proxy.username	Proxy username
proxy.password	Proxy account password

User Permissions

In order to collect metadata, the running user's permissions must allow them to access and read databases that need cataloging.

Here, the user must have the followings access rights:

• dynamodb:ListTables
• dynamodb:DescribeTable

If you want to determine the table's value pattern by means of sampling, the following additional access right is required:

• dynamodb:PartiQLSelect

Data Extraction

To extract information, the connector runs requests on the API:

• listTables
• describeTable
• executeStatement(Statement='select * from [table_name]', Limit=[sample_size]) (only with the sampling feature)

Collected Metadata

Inventory

Will collect the list of tables accessible by the user.

Dataset

A dataset is a DynamoDB table.

• Name
• Source Description
• Technical Data:
  • AWS Region
  • Creation Date
  • Items Count
  • Table Size

Field

Dataset field.

• Name
• Source Description
• Type
• Can be null: Depending on the field settings
• Multivalued: Not supported. Default value false.
• Primary Key: Depending on the "Primary Key" field attribute
• Technical Data:
  • Technical Name
  • Native type: Field native type
  • Field Kind

Unique Identification Keys

A key is associated with each item of the catalog. When the object comes from an external system, the key is built and provided by the connector.

Read more: Identification Keys

Object	Identifier Key	Description
Dataset	code/region/dataset name	code: Unique identifier of the connection noted in the configuration file region: AWS object region dataset name: Table name
Field	code/region/dataset name/field name	code: Unique identifier of the connection noted in the configuration file region: AWS object region dataset name: Table name field name