Set up a cloud
account and service
account for AWS
Release version: Zurich
Updated July 31, 2025
4 minutes to read
A service
account is a secure record on your instance that stores the credential and access information for your provider account. Discovery uses the information to access your provider account to get data on each resource in each specified datacenter.A cloud
account is the logical representation in Cloud Provisioning and Governance of all or part of your managed cloud infrastructure. A cloud
account can include multiple service
accounts — even service
accounts from different providers. For each service
account, you specify which datacenters to include in the cloud
account.
Before you begin
Role required: none
Operations in the AWS Management Console require the
administrator role.
Operations in Cloud Provisioning and Governance require the sn_cmp.cloud_admin
role.
About this task
When
you finish the Day-1 setup process, your cloud
account might look like this:Figure 1. Structure of a cloud account on Day 1
Procedure
On the Cloud Admin Portal, navigate to Manage > Cloud Accounts.
Select or create the cloud
account:
Select an existing cloud
account:
On the Cloud Account page, click
Configure.
On the General Information page, click Next
and then continue with the next step.
Create a cloud
account:
On the General Information page, click New
and then enter a unique and meaningful Name
and Description for the cloud
account.
Select the provider.
Click Next and then continue with the next
step.
On the Datacenters page, create a service
account: Click the + next to the Service
Account field, and then fill in the form for the service
account.
Table 1. Cloud Service Account form
Field
Description
Name
The unique and meaningful name for this service account.
Account ID
12-digit user account number. Expand the list under the AWS account name on the AWS Management
Console to view the number.
Important:
In the Account ID field, remove the hyphen characters (-) from the number.
Figure 2. IAM user account number
Discovery credentials
The credentials needed for ServiceNow applications to
access this account. You may configure this field at a later stage, while
configuring access to AWS accounts.
To use other AWS accounts to access this account, leave the field blank. For example, you
don't need to specify the AWS credentials for
accounts assuming IAM roles or member accounts using their management account
for access.
Datacenter URL
URL of the datacenter.
This field is required for AWS China region and AWS GovCloud (US) accounts.
For example:
AWS China region: https://organizations.cn-northwest-1.amazonaws.com.cn
Type of the datacenter where the account is hosted.
Select AWS datacenter.
Datacenter discovery status
Auto-generated value: Status and timestamp
of the last execution of Discovery on the datacenter.
Parent account
Name of the management account that
represents the organization in AWS that this member account belongs to.
It appears
when you select AWS datacenter.
Leave the field empty
if this account is not part of an AWS
organization.
Is master
account
Management account flag.
It appears when you select AWS datacenter from the Datacenter Type drop-down. Select the check box to associate the AWS service account with the management account. Select this check box only for accounts that you previously configured in the AWS Management Console as management accounts with some member accounts belonging to them. See the AWS documentation for information on AWS Organizations.
Configure this field only for accounts that
don't use permanent AWS credentials and rely on
IAM roles for access.
Click Submit to create the service
account.
Click Discover Datacenters.
When the datacenters appear, select one or more datacenters to include in the
cloud
account and then click Save.
Note:
Select only those LDCs/Regions where your infrastructure resources are present. If you don't have any resources under these new data centers, exclude them while you run the full discovery.
To discover resources in regions/ LDCs such as, North America (US East, US West and Canada Central), South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific, raise an access request to the required endpoints
with GCP Support.
The Cloud Account dashboard appears. The datacenters that you selected
appear on the Datacenters tab.
Click a datacenter.
The following lists appear:
Resources: Cloud resources for the current
datacenter. Run Discovery to populate the CMDB for the datacenter and
populate the tab. See Discover all datacenters in a service account on-demand.
Capacity Limits: Limits on virtual CPUs, virtual
networks, storage volume size, and other services. See Set capacity limits on user requests for resources.
Discovery Log: The process creates a log record
for each action associated with a discovery status.
What to do next
Configure additional permissions to provision Amazon AWS Cloud
resources using Cloud Provisioning and Governance.
After you complete all procedures
in this initial "Day 1" setup, you can create additional cloud
accounts and service
accounts to organize and compartmentalize your cloud infrastructure.