How to Find All Your Amazon Web Services Resources

To see all resources in your AWS Account, not just the ones for the region you’re currently in, Go to the AWS Console, and then choose:

1. Choose Services, Resource Groups & Tag Editor, Tag Editor.
2. From the dropdowns, choose All Regions and All resource types.
3. Search Resources.
4. To reduce the results to more relevant resources, I filtered on VPC, Instance, Volume, Bucket, RouteTable and Domain.
5. Jackpot, Pay Dirt, Voila.

NOTE: If you have multiple accounts, and haven’t set up a billing account that’s got everything in it, you’ll have to do this for each account.

Details:

I’m studying for the AWS Solutions Architect — Associate certification.

Yesterday, I saw that I’d been billed for an Elastic Block Storage, which I’d created, and didn’t delete for 9 hours. Turns out you get billed for a full month, no matter how long you’ve turned it on for. Oops.

So, okay, fair enough. They’re pricing model is definitely available…but now, I wanted to see ALL the things I might have deployed in the course of the labs I’m doing, to avoid any more surprises like that.

I know it’s possible to set up Organizational Units, and separate accounts. I actually have two, because one of the labs had me set up and connect a second one. The course I’m taking suggested having an account that’s just for billing, and one or more accounts for resources. I haven’t set this up yet. Clearly. LOL.

I did initially think everything in the account was right on the EC2 Dashboard, which looks like this. (Spoiler alert; it’s not)

Turns out, this handy summary is region specific. In my case, this summary is for just one of three regions I’ve got instances in, for the labs I’m doing.

I’m guessing there are other ways to figure out what resources you’ve got deployed, but I wasn’t able to find anything…until I found this:

From the top dropdown in your console:

Services, Resource Groups & Tag Editor, Tag Editor

In the page that comes up, choose All Regionsin the Regions dropdown, and All supported resource types in the Resource Types dropdown.

That search returns all resource types on which tagging is allowed. I’m making an assumption, given that tags have been mentioned several times as ways to see who’s spending what, that any resource I could be billed for would show up in the All supported resource types.

I got quite a long list back. It had items that are just parts of other resources, and aren’t billed separately. (*I think*.). I narrowed the resource types to EC2::VPC, EC2::Instance, EC2::Volume, S3::Bucket, EC2::RouteTable and Route53::Domain, and searched again.

That returned 41 resources, 16 of which were VPCs! That was a bit surprising to me.

I went ahead and selected the 41 results I got back from filtering, and tagged them with Status — DeleteAllThis. :)

This search is ONLY for one account, though. Remember, I mentioned I’d created TWO accounts. If you do this, and you have multiple accounts, don’t forget to repeat this process for the other one.

Hope this helps someone else digging around, trying to figure out how to see all the resources they’ve got in their AWS account, regardless of the current region.

If you know of another way to find this information (BEFORE you’re getting billed for it, LOL!), please let me know in the comments, kk? Thanx!