How To Find AWS Resource Using AWS Resource Explorer

In this article, we will see how can we quickly find AWS Resources from your AWS account using AWS Resource Explorer.

AWS Resource Explorer eases search and discovery of your relevant AWS resources across AWS Regions using keywords, tags and other metadata.

Using Resource explorer, you can search your resources like AWS EC2, CloudWatch dashboards, S3, RDS, CloudFormation, etc. You can use AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or any AWS SDK to discover resources in AWS account.

In this article, we will go through AWS Management Console to search our resources.

How it Works?

Go to AWS Search Console and type AWS Resource Explorer.

Click on ‘Turn on Resource Explorer’ to start using Resource Explorer. After turning it ON, it will start creating indexes of your AWS resources to provide quick response to your search queries. It can take few hours after creating index to fetch all relevant resources else your search results might incur wrong results.

There are two options that you will see to create views using following setup,

• Quick Setup
• Advance Setup

If you choose Quick setup, it will create a default view with aggregator index in selected AWS region that provides visibility for all resources across all Regions within your AWS account.

In Advanced setup option, it provides access to more granular controls to fulfill requirement.

Also, user should have IAM policy attached that grant permission to search resources. There are already AWS managed policies that you can use,

• AWSResourceExplorerFullAccess
• AWSResourceExplorerReadOnlyAccess

To query resources included in an index you need a view. While creating a view you can specify filters that can restrict to include resources of specified resource types like you can create view to include only S3 service.

In below screenshot example, a view has been created to search and filter resources for S3 service. It will only include S3 resources in result view and ignore other filters.

Once you Turn On Resource Explorer, it will start creating index in all Regions in your AWS account to fetch resource information. In parallel, you will also see progress in Status column.

Now, once resources have been indexed you can navigate to Resource Explorer to begin searching with AWS Resource Explorer. In Resource Search window, user can select view from View list dropdown that will restrict result based on Resource pattern defined in view definition. In case, user does not select any view a default view gets selected automatically.

In Query Search box, you can define free-from text keywords which are implicitly leveraged by logical OR operator. If you put text like,

• S3 test prod

Then Resource explorer takes these keywords as,

• S3 OR test OR prod

Search for EC2 resources

If you want to search for ec2 resource type in your AWS account then you can put keywords like service:ec2. It will give results related to ec2 resources across all AWS regions as we used Quick Setup while turning on Resource Explorer.

Search for Cloudwatch dashboard

I have already created a CloudWatch dashboard ‘MonitorInstances’ in my AWS account that I can search using Resource Explorer like this –

Cloudwatch:monitor

Similarly, to search S3 buckets created in my AWS Account, I can get results by writing the keyword service:s3 in query search box -

Search using Tag

If you want to search resources based on tag key or value created by a user, then you can search like this –

Tag.value:Kapil

Also, if you want to know which resources in your account do not have any user defined tags then you can also search those resources using keyword tag:none

Search in AWS Management Console

After Resource Explorer Turn ON, you can also search AWS resources using search box in AWS Management Console. To begin searching, you need to add /Resource keyword as first word as shown below -

This capability is called as Unified search, it automatically adds wildcard (*) at end of first keyword and include resources that matches with that keyword. This feature doesn’t work automatically in Research explorer unless you define it manually.

In below example, I tried to find resources created by user kapil or contains keyword Kapil in AWS Management Console search box.

Also, we can try to search same CloudWatch dashboard that we searched earlier using Query Search in Research Explorer. It gives us same result as earlier -

Hence, using AWS Resource Explorer you can find your AWS resources in a faster and more efficient way.

Pricing

AWS doesn’t charge anything to search AWS Resources using AWS Resource Explorer.