How do I check for active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?

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I want to find active resources that I no longer need so that I can avoid unexpected charges.

Resolution

To avoid incurring unexpected charges, it's a best practice to routinely check if you have active resources that you no longer use. Then, terminate these unneeded resources to stop future charges.

Note: You don't need to delete your resources before you close your account.

Check for active resources

Complete the following steps:

  1. Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
  2. In the navigation pane, on the left side of the screen, choose Bills.
  3. In the Charges by service tab, expand each service to identify the AWS Regions where services have incurred charges. You must terminate the resources in those Regions.
    Note: If you use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations, then the Charges by account tab lists totals for all accounts.
  4. Choose a previous month from the dropdown list, on the top-right corner of the page, to view charges for previous months. Note the services that have active resources for the current and previous billing periods.

Note: The Billing and Cost Management console takes about 24 hours to update usage and charge information for active resources.

Terminate active resources

Complete the following steps:

  1. Open the AWS Management Console.
  2. Open the console for the service that contains the resources that you want to terminate (for example, Amazon Simple Storage Service). You can find a specific service by entering the service name in the search bar.
  3. After opening the service console, terminate all your active resources. Make sure to check each Region where you have allocated resources.
    Tip: You can change the Region with the Region selector in the navigation bar.

Important: Some services and subscriptions have resources that remain active, even after you terminate the service. If you terminate any active resources from the following list, then you might need to take additional steps to prevent unwanted charges:

  • Subscriptions, such as Reserved Instances (RIs), AWS Marketplace, and Savings Plans
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
  • Amazon Lightsail
  • AWS Directory Service

To terminate your active resources for these commonly used AWS services, see How do I terminate active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?

Confirm you have terminated all active resources

Complete the following steps:

  1. Open AWS Resource Groups.
  2. In the navigation pane, on the left side of the screen, choose Tag Editor.
  3. For Regions, choose All regions.
  4. For Resource types, choose All supported resource types.
  5. Choose Search resources. If search results appear, then there are still active resources on the account.
    Note: Resource Groups search results don't show AWS Marketplace subscriptions. To manage subscriptions, see Managing your software.

Related information

Understanding unexpected charges

How do I make sure I don't incur charges when I'm using the AWS Free Tier?

What do I need to know if my Free Tier period with AWS is expiring?

AWS OFFICIAL
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 4 months ago
12 Comments

There is no details section.

replied a year ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied a year ago

I have deleted all the resources as they are free tier ones that are expiring soon, however, when I check my resources from "resource groups & tag editor" (https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/resource-groups/home?region=eu-west-1) I could find there 148 resources even though I had only 2 so, I'm not sure why I have all these really, I just want to make sure that I won't get billed because of these unused resources.

Thank you!

replied 10 months ago

The same here as @abdelrahman mentioned. I didn't use any services as I created an account at a workshop. But when I do a resource search in the Tag Editor I get 148 resources, which are all EC2 like DHCPOptions, InternetGateway, etc. What are they? Do I need to delete them? So confusing.

alina
replied 10 months ago

Thank you for your comments. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 10 months ago

There is no details section. Would it be too difficult to add an item below "Bills" for "Active Resources"? It could simply open up a page listing all resources being used (or a tree of resources actively used).

replied 9 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 9 months ago

same issue as abdelrahman - have you adressed this ? how do i make sure you dont bill me i have closed my free service but got 148 resources... purposely done complicated

replied 8 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 8 months ago

With all due respect, this article is not clear nor intuitive. I've had to do my own research to solve this problem and I've summarized what you need to do.

How to terminate your resources:

1 - acess AWS Dashboard

2 - in the search bar type in "tag editor"

3 - in "Find resources to tag" > "Regions" leave **"All regions" ** selected

4 - in "Resource types" select "AWS::EC2::Instance"

5 - Click "Search resources"

6 - All your active resources will be listed. Right click the name of the resource > "open in a new tab"

6 - in the new tab you've opened, go to "Instances" > "Instances".

7 - Go to the Instance name and right-click it and then click "terminate"

Now, in order to terminate your account:

1 - on AWS Dashboard, click on your user name on the top-right corner of the screen

2 - select "Account"

3 - roll all the way down and click "Terminate your account"

See? It's not so hard :)

replied 7 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 7 months ago

Wow, same thing happened to me. I have crated only one VPC (Virtual Private Network) Service under one of the Europe Regions. But Amazon seems to distribute that VPC under all other regions as well, at least most of them. Why? I don't even want to get into that. Maybe it's how it all works. But definitely is too complicated to delete the same service for every region. Especially when you only created it under one region. Nice way to earn money :) Anyway... you do have to delete each of these service you find as active when you search in the Tag Editor, otherwise your card will be charged, regardless if you close your account. Don't risk it. I had to go region by region to delete services.

I only created my service ONCE, but had to delete it 18 times (because there were 18 regions where my service was active). Why did Amazon create my service under Singapore, Mumbai or Tokyo regions? I never asked for that. Who knows. Gladly terminating my account here. (didn't even need it xD).

Cheers!

nina777
replied 7 months ago