** Context: ** DocumentDB has no public endpoints and lives in its own VPC, the upshot of which is that to interact with the data (ie get a shell) you must tunnel/hop through an EC2 instance in the same VPC as the DocumentDB cluster

0) Start up a "helper instance" in same VPC as the DocumentDB Cluster

• SSH to the instance

1) Setup instance to work with mongo

• Follow instructions here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide/getting-started.connect.html

Important: you need rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem on the instance, which is listed in instructions above

Connect to mongobdb (from SSH):

Enter the following command (swap out URL and username & password)

$ mongo --ssl --host your-docdb-2035-01-02-03-04-05.cluster-abcdefghijk123.us-west-2.docdb.amazonaws.com:27017 --sslCAFile rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem --username USER_NAME_HERE --password PASSWORD_HERE

View data commands once authenticated above

$ show dbs #should see a database named "documentdb"

$ use documentdb

$ show collections # should show only one collection named "events"

$ db.events.find() # dump everything on screen

$ exit # Kill your session

Disconnect

$ exit