AWS Kinesis Firehose not inserting data in Redshift

Go to the IAM role(firehose_delivery_role) auto-created during the Kinesis Firehose setup and make sure that the following roles are attached:

AmazonS3FullAccess
AmazonRedshiftFullAccess
AmazonKinesisFullAccess
AmazonKinesisFirehoseFullAccess

There is a bug that omits the S3 credentials in IAM, leaving the Kinesis setup unable to work.

Also verify that you in fact see the data files accumulating in S3.

In the end, I made it work by deleting and re-creating the Firehose stream :-/ Probably the repeated edits via the web console made the thing unstable.

But here are troubleshooting guidelines :

• A good start point is this procedure : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/firehose/latest/dev/troubleshooting.html
• Check that data is arriving in S3
  • There must be an IAM role for firehose delivery, with a trust relationship between the firehose service and this role
  • This IAM role must have S3 access policy
  • See the policy jsons here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/firehose/latest/dev/controlling-access.html#using-iam-s3
• At this point, the "DeliveryToS3 Success" metric in Firehose monitoring should be non-zero
• The Redshift cluster must be publicly accessible (see cluster web console)
• The security group of the cluster must allow inbound traffic from Firehose IP addresses : Firehose currently uses one CIDR block for each available AWS Region:
  • 52.70.63.192/27 for US East (N. Virginia)
  • 52.89.255.224/27 for US West (Oregon)
  • 52.19.239.192/27 for EU (Ireland)
• Double check the redshift user/password you gave to Firehose

• At this point, you should be able to see the connection attempts in Redshift logs :

  select * from stl_connection_log where remotehost like '52%' order by recordtime desc;  
  

• Check that the Redshift user used by Firehose has enough privileges on the target table :

  select tablename, 
     HAS_TABLE_PRIVILEGE(tablename, 'select') as select,
     HAS_TABLE_PRIVILEGE(tablename, 'insert') as insert,
     HAS_TABLE_PRIVILEGE(tablename, 'update') as update,
     HAS_TABLE_PRIVILEGE(tablename, 'delete') as delete, 
     HAS_TABLE_PRIVILEGE(tablename, 'references') as references 
  from pg_tables where schemaname='public' order by tablename;
  

• Then you can check if the COPY command is run :

  select * from stl_query order by endtime desc limit 10;
  

• Then check load errors, or server errors :

  select * from stl_load_errors  order by starttime desc;
  select * from stl_error where userid!=0 order by recordtime desc;
  

• If you have format problems in your data, or in the COPY options, or a mismatch between your data and the target columns, you should at least see the COPY attempts, and some load errors.

• If you're still stuck, with nothing appearing in those log tables, try deleting and recreating the whole firehose stream, as there may be some bugs related to the web console. (This step worked for me)