Query instances by tag and attributes with Advanced Search

Posted on: Sep 2, 2014

Advanced Search is a new feature in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) console that makes it easy for you to manage your growing number of instances. It allows you to query your EC2 instances using a combination of tags and instance attributes. Not only can you perform simple keyword searches as you always could, but now you can also define granular set of filter criteria to query your instances and generate customized views in the console that you can easily come back to in the future.

For example, if you use tags to label your instances by project, teams or environment, Advanced Search allow you to filter your instances based on those tags and easily append additional filters such as availability zone, launch time, health and status to further narrow down to the instances you really care about. Queries are captured in the browser URL so you can bookmark them or share them with others on the same team.

Advanced Search provides a number of different ways for you to query your instances, including:
• Keyword search
• Tags and attribute filters
• Multiple filters
• Partial string matching
• Regular expression
• Inverse search

Advanced Search currently support EC2 instances. Support for other EC2 resource types are coming soon.

Learn more about what you can do with Advance Search in our blog post.