How to tell which AWS services you’re using

9th January 2018 5:11 pm

Amazon Web Services is a behemoth. When you’re using it – whether you’ve completely set up your account from scratch yourself; have inherited it from someone else; or are using it within a team of people – from time-to-time it becomes necessary to figure out just which AWS services you’ve set up.

As far as I can tell there’s no unified list of what you’ve created, and of course it’s exacerbated by the sheer number of AWS services and regions.

So to help me out when I need to do this again next time – and to help you out if you’ve stumbled across this post – here’s some quick ways to determine which services your AWS account is using:

  • Visit Billing (which does not care what region you’re in) and check the dashboard’s Month-to-Date Spend by Service, or browse through the detailed bills.
  • Visit CloudWatch’s metrics to see which metric categories and individual metrics are available (region specific, and it won’t cover everything, but it can be helpful).
  • If you’ve turned on billing alerts in your Billing Preferences, visit CloudWatch’s metrics in us-east-1 (the default region) and browse the metrics in the Billing category.
  • Visit the Tag Editor, select all the regions, and search for All resource types (note that only some resource types are supported by the tag editor).

Know of any more methods to find out what you’ve provisioned? Let me know in the comments.