When you seek help from Alibaba Cloud technical support to locate problems that occurred
on your ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance, you may need to grant permissions to a service
account. The service account is used by Alibaba Cloud technical support to perform
operations on the databases of your RDS instance. After the specified expiration time
elapses, ApsaraDB RDS deletes the service account.
Prerequisites
Your RDS instance runs one of the following MySQL versions and RDS editions:
- MySQL 8.0 on RDS High-availability Edition (with local SSDs) or Enterprise Edition
- MySQL 5.7 on RDS High-availability Edition (with local SSDs) or Enterprise Edition
- MySQL 5.6 on RDS High-availability Edition
- MySQL 5.5 on RDS High-availability Edition
Procedure
- Go to the Accounts page.
- Log on to the ApsaraDB for RDS console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Instances. In the top navigation bar, select the region where your RDS instance resides.
- Find your RDS instance and click its ID. In the left-side navigation pane, click Accounts.
- On the Service Account Permissions tab, find the permission that you want to grant to the service account, and turn
on the switch in the Permission Status column.
- For problems that are related to IP address whitelists or database parameters, you
can grant only the Configuration Permission to the service account.
- For database performance problems that are caused by applications, you must grant
the Data Permission to the service account.

- In the dialog box that appears, specify the expiration time of the service account
and click OK.
What to do next
After you grant permissions to the service account, you can revoke the permissions
or change the expiration time on the Service Account Permissions tab at any time.