Unattached AWS elastic block store volumes

Data required 

AWS description data

Example

1. Configure the Splunk Add-on for Amazon Web Services.
2. Ensure that your deployment is ingesting AWS data through one of the following methods:
   • Pulling the data from Splunk via AWS APIs. At small scale, pull via the AWS APIs will work fine.
   • Pushing the data from AWS into Splunk via Lambda/Firehose to Splunk HTTP event collector. As the size and scale of either your AWS accounts or the amount of data to be collected grows, pushing data from AWS into Splunk is the easier and more scalable method.
3. Run the following search. You can optimize it by specifying an index and adjusting the time range.

sourcetype="aws:description" region="*" source="*:ec2_volumes" status!="in-use"
|dedup id sortby -_time 
|rename "attach_data.instance_id" AS instanceId 
|table account_id id region instanceId size status type

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Next steps

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. The volumes listed are not in use and could be eligible for deletion or archiving to less expensive storage. 

The AWS app does a similar search and provides additional insight for EBS volumes, including Non-Optimized EBS, no recent snapshot, and large and small IOPS. These can be found by navigating to EBS Insights > Insights Filter.

Finally, you might be interested in other processes associated with the Managing an Amazon Web Services environment use case.