Amazon Resource Explorer FAQs

Amazon Resource Explorer is a managed capability that makes it quicker to search and discover your Amazon Web Services resources across Amazon Web Services Regions and accounts. You can start your search from the unified search bar in the Amazon Web Services Management Console or the Amazon Resource Explorer console, or use the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI) or the Amazon SDKs. From the results returned, you can navigate directly to the appropriate service console and Region to work with that resource. You can further explore the results to filter through your resources using application identifiers, tags, service types, and other metadata.

By using Amazon Resource Explorer, you can save time, money, and effort by discovering your resources across Amazon Web Services Regions and accounts without manually constructing and maintaining resource inventories. Amazon Resource Explorer does not require you to learn a query language or construct complex queries, so you can find your resources even if you do not know exactly which resource you’re searching for or in which Amazon Web Services Region or account it is in. Results are sorted with the most relevant results at the top. You can learn more in our documentation.

Amazon Resource Explorer supports resources with Amazon Resource Names (ARNs), such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon Kinesis data streams, and Amazon DynamoDB tables. A full list of supported resources is available in the documentation or accessible from the ListSupportedResourceTypes API.

To get started, you must turn on and set up Amazon Resource Explorer in your account. Next, use freeform text and filters to search for your resources using the Amazon CLI or the Amazon SDKs. You can use Amazon Resource Explorer to discover untagged resources, resources by Region, resources across accounts and resources by service type. To learn more about searching, see example Resource Explorer search queries. 

Yes, with Amazon Resource Explorer, you can search for resources across Amazon Web Services Regions with a single search. To do so, you must search a view that has been configured in the Region that is your aggregator index. Read more about aggregator indexes.

Yes. You can configure Amazon Resource Explorer across all accounts in your Amazon Organization through Amazon CloudFormation or Amazon Systems Manager Quick Setup. Once configured, you can assign a Delegate Administrator and create multi-account views for your entire organization or for a specific organizational unit (OU). Multi-account views can then be shared with others within your organization using Amazon Resource Access Manager.

You can share your Amazon Resource Explorer views with any Amazon Web Services account with Amazon Resource Access Manager (Amazon RAM). If you are part of an organization in Amazon Organizations and sharing within your organization is enabled, you can also share resources with OUs or your entire organization.

You can see where Amazon Resource Explorer is available by visiting Amazon Regional Services.

Amazon Resource Explorer can be accessed through the SDKs listed on the Amazon Web Services tools page. Amazon Resource Explorer is supported by Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI), a unified tool for you to download, configure, and control multiple Amazon Web Services services from the command line and automate them through scripts.

Amazon Resource Explorer indexes resources from supported services in the Amazon Web Services Regions that you specify. In the management console, Resource Explorer also fetches additional resource properties from services such as Amazon Config, Amazon Cost Explorer, Amazon CloudControl API, and Amazon CloudTrail, if enabled.

Amazon Config provides inventory, full configuration history, and the ability to track configuration changes in an Amazon Web Services account or Amazon Organization. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource-change tracking, and troubleshooting. By using Resource Explorer, you can search for and find relevant Amazon Web Services resources using application identifiers, basic resource metadata, and tags from anywhere in the Amazon Web Services Management Console. If you already have Amazon Config enabled or you enable it, you’ll be able to see compliance and configuration data in Resource Explorer.

Amazon Resource Explorer is eventually consistent. Amazon Resource Explorer achieves high availability by replicating data across multiple servers within Amazon Web Services data centers around the world. If a request to change some data is successful, the change is committed and safely stored. However, the change must then be replicated across Amazon Resource Explorer, which can take up to 36 hours.

Amazon Resource Explorer indexes and processes only resource metadata such as Amazon Resource Name (ARN), Resource ID, and Region. It does not handle any customer data.

You control the data that is searchable in Amazon Resource Explorer. You define which resources are visible in your Amazon Resource Explorer views by using filters such as tag name and value, Amazon Web Services Region, and service or resource type. For example, you can limit a view to search a specific application’s resources in a specific set of Regions, so users see resources that apply only to them.

When you turn on Amazon Resource Explorer, you choose the Amazon Web Services Regions to index. Amazon Resource Explorer stores data about a Region’s resources only in that Region. Amazon Resource Explorer can move data outside of that Region only if you enable an optional aggregator index. This aggregator index receives resource information from other Regions indexed in your account.

Yes. For example searches to identify untagged and improperly tagged resources, see the Amazon Web Services documentation.

To identify untagged and improperly tagged resources, we also recommend implementing a tagging strategy in addition to using Amazon Resource Explorer. See the Amazon Web Services documentation on tagging beset practices. To manage tags on untagged and improperly tagged resources that you discover with Amazon Resource Explorer, you can use the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Resource Groups Tag Editor, or the Amazon Resource Groups Tagging API.

No additional charge is incurred for using Resource Explorer. If enabled, some features in the Resource Explorer console are dependent on other Amazon Web Services services, such as Amazon Config, which are billed separately.