What is AWS Resource Explorer? - AWS Resource Explorer

What is AWS Resource Explorer?

AWS Resource Explorer is a resource search and discovery service. With Resource Explorer, you can explore your resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, Amazon Kinesis streams, or Amazon DynamoDB tables, using an internet search engine-like experience. You can search for your resources using resource metadata like names, tags, and IDs. Resource Explorer works across AWS Regions in your account to simplify your cross-Region workloads.

Resource Explorer provides fast responses to your search queries by using indexes that are created and maintained by the AWS Resource Explorer service. Resource Explorer uses a variety of data sources to gather information about resources in your AWS account. Resource Explorer stores that information in the indexes for Resource Explorer to search.

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Our goal is to help you get everything you can from Resource Explorer. If this guide helps you to do that, then let us know. If the guide isn't helping you, then we want to hear from you so we can address the issue. Use the Feedback link that's in the upper-right corner of every page. That sends your comments directly to the writers of this guide. We review every submission, looking for opportunities to improve the documentation. Thank you in advance for your help!

Are you a first-time Resource Explorer user?

If you're a first-time user of Resource Explorer, we recommend that you begin by reading the following topics in the Getting started section:

Features of Resource Explorer

Resource Explorer provides the following features:

  • Users can search for resources in their AWS Region or across Regions in their AWS account.

  • Users can use keywords, search operators, and attributes like tags to filter the search results to only matching resources.

  • When users find a resource in the search results, they can immediately go to the resource's native console to work with that resource.

  • Administrators can create views that define which resources are available in search results. Administrators can create different views for different groups of users based on their tasks, and grant permissions to views to only those users who need them.

  • Resource Explorer, like many other AWS services, is eventually consistent. Resource Explorer achieves high availability by replicating data across multiple servers within Amazon data centers around the world. If a request to change some data is successful, the change is committed and safely stored. However, then the change must be replicated across Resource Explorer, which can take some time. As an example, this includes Resource Explorer finding a resource in one Region, and replicating that to the Region that contains the aggregator index for the account.

Resource Explorer supported Regions

Region Name Region Endpoint Protocol
US East (Ohio) us-east-2 resource-explorer-2.us-east-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 resource-explorer-2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
US West (N. California) us-west-1 resource-explorer-2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
US West (Oregon) us-west-2 resource-explorer-2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Africa (Cape Town) af-south-1 resource-explorer-2.af-south-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) ap-east-1 resource-explorer-2.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) ap-south-2 resource-explorer-2.ap-south-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Jakarta) ap-southeast-3 resource-explorer-2.ap-southeast-3.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Melbourne) ap-southeast-4 resource-explorer-2.ap-southeast-4.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Mumbai) ap-south-1 resource-explorer-2.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Osaka) ap-northeast-3 resource-explorer-2.ap-northeast-3.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Seoul) ap-northeast-2 resource-explorer-2.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-1 resource-explorer-2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Sydney) ap-southeast-2 resource-explorer-2.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1 resource-explorer-2.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Canada (Central) ca-central-1 resource-explorer-2.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Canada West (Calgary) ca-west-1 resource-explorer-2.ca-west-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Frankfurt) eu-central-1 resource-explorer-2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Ireland) eu-west-1 resource-explorer-2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (London) eu-west-2 resource-explorer-2.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Milan) eu-south-1 resource-explorer-2.eu-south-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Paris) eu-west-3 resource-explorer-2.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Spain) eu-south-2 resource-explorer-2.eu-south-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Stockholm) eu-north-1 resource-explorer-2.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Europe (Zurich) eu-central-2 resource-explorer-2.eu-central-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Israel (Tel Aviv) il-central-1 resource-explorer-2.il-central-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Middle East (Bahrain) me-south-1 resource-explorer-2.me-south-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
Middle East (UAE) me-central-1 resource-explorer-2.me-central-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS
South America (São Paulo) sa-east-1 resource-explorer-2.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS

The following are the other AWS services whose primary purpose is to help you manage your AWS resources:

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)

Share the resources in one AWS account with other AWS accounts. If your account is managed by AWS Organizations, you can use AWS RAM to share resources with the accounts in an organizational unit, or all of the accounts in the organization. The shared resources work for users in those accounts just like they would if they were created in the local account.

AWS Resource Groups

Create groups for your AWS resources. Then, you can use and manage each group as a unit instead of having to reference every resource individually. Your groups can consist of resources that are part of the same AWS CloudFormation stack, or that are tagged with the same tags. Some resource types also support applying a configuration to a resource group to affect all relevant resources in that group.

Tag editor and the AWS Resource Groups Tagging API

Tags are customer-defined metadata that you can attach to your resources. You can categorize your resources for purposes like cost allocation and attribute-based access control.

Pricing

There are no charges to search for resources by using AWS Resource Explorer, including creating views, turning on Regions, or searching for resources. In the process of building your resource inventory, Resource Explorer calls APIs on your behalf that may result in charges. Interacting with the resources that you find in your search results can result in usage charges that vary depending on the resource type and its AWS service. For more information about how AWS bills for the normal use of a specific resource type, refer to the documentation for that resource type's owning service.