Connecting Amazon Connect (beta)

Erlangly connects to Amazon Connect itself: it checks your agents' states every few seconds (for adherence and the wallboard) and reads your queues' volumes every 15 minutes (for forecasting), with the last 13 weeks when you first connect. It only reads, and it connects out to AWS, so nothing on your network has to be reachable from the internet. It's built from AWS's API documentation and marked beta until more customers run it: if anything looks wrong, the connection's page has a diagnostics file to send us.

1. In AWS: an IAM user with a read-only policy

1. An AWS admin opens IAM → Policies → Create policy, switches to JSON, and pastes the policy shown on Erlangly's Connect Amazon Connect page, with your instance's ARN in place of the example. It allows reading your Connect instance's agents, statuses, routing profiles, queues and figures, and nothing else.
2. IAM → Users → Create user: name it Erlangly, no console access, and attach that policy.
3. Open the user → Security credentials → Create access key (for an application running outside AWS). Copy the access key ID and secret access key: the secret is shown only once.

2. In Erlangly: connect

1. Settings → Connections → Add a connection → Amazon Connect. Paste your instance's ARN (in the Amazon Connect console, on the instance's overview: it names the region too) and the access key's ID and secret. Erlangly checks them with AWS before saving.
2. State codes: an agent on a contact is in that contact's state (on contact, on hold, after contact work, missed); otherwise in their own status. They come mapped: contacts → On a call, after contact work → After-call work, Offline → Offline, and your own statuses by name (Lunch → Lunch, Break → Break, Training → Aux…). Check them, and change any that mean something else on your floor.
3. Agents link by email the first time: their Connect username when it's an email address, or the email on their Connect user. Anyone else shows up under the connection to link by hand.
4. Queues: a queue that takes calls and chats is listed once for each, so each can feed its own line of business. Erlangly reads their last 13 weeks straight away (as much as AWS keeps), then every 15 minutes.

Erlangly asks AWS at most once a second, half of what AWS allows by default, so your own dashboards and tools keep their share; on a big floor, states are checked a little less often. The connection's page shows whether Erlangly is following Connect, when the last state change came, and what Connect sent (names masked). If AWS refuses the key, the policy or the instance, it says which, and keeps trying.