AWS Correlation Failure & 'Ghost Account' Error in BigFix

1

The Problem Statement

We observed a failure in AWS Correlation where many servers were appearing as separate Native and Proxy entries in the BigFix Console (Ghosting Effect). The correlation—the process of merging these two identities using the AWS Instance ID—was working fine until recently.

The "Smoking Gun" (Error Logs)

Upon checking the BESPluginPortal.log and the AWS Plugin logs, we identified repeated authentication failures. The Plugin Portal was stuck in a loop trying to scan an account that had been terminated in the AWS Console.

2026/04/07 11:17:17 +0000 - [error] AWS Full Discovery for 'AWxxxxxxxxxxx' and role 'arn:aws:iam::307431060667:role/bigfixcloud-connector' GetAvailableRegions failed with error: AccessDenied: User: arn:aws:iam::394757088909:user/svcacct-bigfix-patching is not authorized to perform: sts:AssumeRole on resource: arn:aws:iam::307431060667:role/bigfixcloud-connector status code: 403

The Secondary Issue (UI Bug)

When trying to remove the dead account via the WebUI / Cloud Provisioning Dashboard, we encountered a Javascript error:

Error: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'indexOf')

This happens because the dashboard tries to pull metadata for an account ID that no longer exists in the AWS cloud provider, causing the script to crash.

My Questions:

  1. Is there a way to force-delete a cloud account when the WebUI/Dashboard is throwing this indexOf error?

  2. Does a failing discovery on one "ghost" account affect the correlation of other active accounts in the same Plugin Portal?

  3. What is the best practice to clean up terminated AWS accounts to restore normal correlation?

2

You could try deploying an action from the console containing the “ghost” account.

The action script is something similar to removing a client’s setting. I don’t have a working example right now but I have done that in the past.

We are heavily using the AWS plugin to manage +10K AWS EC2 instances and we have faced different issues but I have never seen the behavior that you mention(Currently running BigFix v11.0.4 and the AWS Plugin v2.5.10.

3

About The Secondary Issue (UI Bug)
there’s a defect published and it will be fixed with the next WebUI release: WebUI Amazon cloud plugin: cannot add new roles - Customer Support