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Current AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances

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Your organization has a large number of EC2 instances currently deployed to AWS. You want to see which of them are running so you can decide whether to stop the ones not in use in order to save on cloud cost.

Data required

AWS: Description data

Procedure

  1. Configure the Splunk Add-on for Amazon WebServices.
  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.
    • 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. 
    source="*:ec2_instances" sourcetype="aws:description"
|dedup id sortby -_time
|table account_id region id, instance_type image_id ip_address state
|sort +state

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.

Splunk Search Explanation

source="*:ec2_instances" sourcetype="aws:description"

Search only your EC2 instances and filter by description data.

|dedup id sortby -_time

Remove duplicate instances by ID and sort the remaining results with the most recent instances first.

|table account_id region id, instance_type image_id ip_address state

Display the results in a table with columns in the order shown.

|sort +state

Sort the results by state in ascending order.

Next steps

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. It provides an inventory of running instances, including their types, region, network address, and state.

account_id region id instance_type image_id ip_address state

123456789

ap-southeast-1

i-222222

m3.2xlarge

ami-c6634294

null

running

63605715280

ap-southeast-1

i-3f3152b1

t2.micro

ami-c9b572aa

54.169.12.168

running

123456789

ap-southeast-1

i-444444

m3.xlarge

ami-c6634294

null

running

123456789

ap-southeast-1

i-55555

m3.2xlarge

ami-c6634294

null

running

123456789

ap-southeast-1

i-99999

m3.2xlarge

ami-c6634294

null

running

123456789

ap-southeast-1

i-66666

m3.2xlarge

ami-c6634294

null

running

63605715280

ap-southeast-1

i-3181671a

c3.2xlarge

ami-64a9f236

54.169.28.253

running

The sources hold a large number of other fields that could be useful to track. Examples include launch time and memory capacity. You can use this and other, similar searches to build inventory reports. Then, inventory data such as usage, age, and location can be used to find efficiencies, which are important in a cloud environment due to usage fees. This type of information can help you maintain infrastructure in the most cost effective way.

​You might also want to look at other searches in Managing an Amazon Web Services environment.