Unattached AWS elastic block store volumes

You might want to know which of your AWS elastic block store (EBS) volumes are unattached when doing the following:

• Managing an Amazon Web Services environment

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, you may need to first on-board the data, services, or apps shown in the following table.

Example

The purpose of this example is to show how this procedure works in a general environment. In your environment, you can optimize the search by specifying an index, a time range, or a different data source. 

Unattached EBS volumes represent storage that's allocated but not in use or accessible to any system. You want to see which of your EBS volumes are unattached so you can decide if they should be deleted to save on cloud costs.

1. Run the following search: 

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.

Result

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.