Account Activity and Account Usage access not working

Question

I have an IAM user who has Administrator Access. This user cannot access Account Activity or the Account Usage pages. They see the "Permission Denied" message with "You do not have the required permissions to view the contents of this page." These are the steps which I followed to give them the access:

• Logged in from the root account.
• Configured my security questions.
• Activate IAM user access to the AWS website.
• Added following policies to the user:

a) For Account Activity Access

    {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
       {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
            "aws-portal:ViewBilling"
          ],
          "Resource": "*"
       }
       ]
    }

b) For Account Usage Access

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "aws-portal:ViewUsage"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

But still the user is unable to access the account activity and the account usage pages.

Can anyone tell me what is wrong here ?

Answer 1

I've been having the same problem, at it seems that IAM users are not allowed to see the account activity even if they have the permissions set.

Found a mention of this problem on the amazon forum, see https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=86391

Update: I've since found that it can be done. As well as setting the required permissions to the user in IAM, you also need to enable that option within the main AWS account. Login using the main AWS credentials, and go to 'Manage your account'. On that page there is a section to do with enabling access to the account activity, make sure that both boxes are ticked and click the button to enable/activate these permissions.

Once that has been done, IAM users will then be able to see the account activity.