How can I list Amazon EBS volume or snapshot information for my Amazon EC2 instance by using the AWS CLI?

Last updated: 2019-12-12

How can I list Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume or snapshot information for my Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)?

Resolution

Note: Install the jq processor before running the commands.

Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2:

$ sudo wget -O jq https://github.com/stedolan/jq/releases/download/jq-1.6/jq-linux64
$ sudo chmod +x ./jq
$ sudo cp jq /usr/bin

For other distributions, see jq Command Line Processor on the GitHub website for download and installation instructions.

Find all snapshots over 1 month old

The following command lists all EBS snapshots using the describe-snapshots operation, where the timestamp is older than one month ( --date='-1 month').

$ aws ec2 describe-snapshots --owner self --output json | jq '.Snapshots[] | select(.StartTime < "'$(date --date='-1 month' '+%Y-%m-%d')'") | [.Description, .StartTime, .SnapshotId]'

List snapshots over 1 month old in all Regions

The following example command uses the same command as in the first example. It also loops through snapshots in all Regions using the describe-regions operation.  

$ for REGION in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[].[RegionName]') ; do echo $REGION && aws ec2 describe-snapshots --owner self --region $REGION --output json | jq '.Snapshots[] | select(.StartTime < "'$(date --date='-1 month' '+%Y-%m-%d')'") | [.Description, .StartTime, .SnapshotId]' ; done

Find all publicly available snapshots in an AWS account in all Regions

This example command lists all snapshots where the CreateVolumePermission Group is equal to all, for all Regions.

$ for REGION in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[].[RegionName]') ; do echo "$REGION:"; for snap in $(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --owner self --output json --region $REGION --query 'Snapshots[*].SnapshotId' | jq -r '.[]'); do aws ec2 describe-snapshot-attribute --snapshot-id $snap --region $REGION --output json --attribute createVolumePermission --query '[SnapshotId,CreateVolumePermissions[?Group == `all`]]' | jq -r '.[]'; done; echo; done

Get the status of all volumes currently in the optimizing stage (after volume modification) in all Regions

The following example command lists all volumes by using the describe-volumes-modifications operation, where the modification-state is set to the value of optimizing, for all Regions.  

$ for REGION in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[].[RegionName]') ; do echo $REGION && aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications --query 'VolumesModifications[].{VolumeID:VolumeId,TargetSize:TargetSize,OriginalSize:OriginalSize,Progress:Progress,OriginalIops:OriginalIops,TargetIops:TargetIops}' --output json --filter 'Name=modification-state,Values=optimizing' --region $REGION; done

Find all volumes not attached to any instance in all Regions

This example command lists volumes where the status is set to available, for all Regions.  

$ for REGION in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[].[RegionName]') ; do echo $REGION && aws ec2 describe-volumes --filter "Name=status,Values=available" --query 'Volumes[*].{VolumeID:VolumeId,Size:Size,Type:VolumeType,AvailabilityZone:AvailabilityZone}' --region $REGION; done

Find all volumes in the "error" state in all Regions

The following example command describes all volumes, in all Regions, where the status is set to error.

$ for REGION in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --output text --query 'Regions[].[RegionName]') ; do echo $REGION && aws ec2 describe-volumes --filter "Name=status,Values=error" --query 'Volumes[*].{VolumeID:VolumeId,Size:Size,Type:VolumeType,AvailabilityZone:AvailabilityZone}' --region $REGION; done

AWS Command Line Interface

GNU Bash

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