unused_volumes

AWS Unused Volumes

Deprecated

This policy is no longer being updated. The AWS Rightsize EBS Volumes policy has superseded this one and includes significantly more functionality.

What It Does

This Policy finds unused volumes in the given account and deletes them after user approval. The user can optionally create a snapshot before deleting the volume. CloudWatch is used to determine its use by checking if there are read or write operations within the number of user-specified days. The Volume Status parameter will determine whether to include attached volumes in the resulting incident, unattached, or both. Policy Incident will be created with all of volumes that fall into these criteria.

If the issue causing the delete failure is removed, the next run of the policy will delete the volume. Note: The unused volumes incident will reflect the updated set of unused volumes on the subsequent run.

Optionally, the user can specify one or more tags that if found on a volume will exclude the volume from the list.

Policy Savings Details

The policy includes the estimated monthly savings. The estimated monthly savings is recognized if the resource is terminated.

• The Estimated Monthly Savings is calculated by multiplying the amortized cost of the resource for 1 day, as found within Flexera CCO, by 30.44, which is the average number of days in a month.
• Since the costs of individual resources are obtained from Flexera CCO, they will take into account any Flexera adjustment rules or cloud provider discounts present in the Flexera platform.
• If the resource cannot be found in Flexera CCO, the Estimated Monthly Savings is 0.
• The incident message detail includes the sum of each resource Estimated Monthly Savings as Potential Monthly Savings.
• Both Estimated Monthly Savings and Potential Monthly Savings will be reported in the currency of the Flexera organization the policy is applied in.

Input Parameters

This policy has the following input parameters required when launching the policy.

• Email addresses to notify - Email addresses of the recipients you wish to notify when new incidents are created.
• Account Number - The Account number for use with the AWS STS Cross Account Role. Leave blank when using AWS IAM Access key and secret. It only needs to be passed when the desired AWS account is different than the one associated with the Flexera One credential. More information is available in our documentation.
• Allow/Deny Regions - Whether to treat Allow/Deny Regions List parameter as allow or deny list. Has no effect if Allow/Deny Regions List is left empty.
• Allow/Deny Regions List - A list of regions to allow or deny for an AWS account. Please enter the regions code if SCP is enabled. See Available Regions in AWS; otherwise, the policy may fail on regions that are disabled via SCP. Leave blank to consider all the regions.
• Unused Days - The number of days a volume has been unused. The days should be greater than zero.
• Minimum Savings Threshold - Minimum potential savings required to generate a recommendation.
• Volume Status - Whether to include attached volumes, unattached, or both in the results.
• Exclusion Tags - The policy will filter resources containing the specified tags from the results. The following formats are supported:
  • Key - Filter all resources with the specified tag key.
  • Key==Value - Filter all resources with the specified tag key:value pair.
  • Key!=Value - Filter all resources missing the specified tag key:value pair. This will also filter all resources missing the specified tag key.
  • Key=~/Regex/ - Filter all resources where the value for the specified key matches the specified regex string.
  • Key!~/Regex/ - Filter all resources where the value for the specified key does not match the specified regex string. This will also filter all resources missing the specified tag key.
• Exclusion Tags: Any / All - Whether to filter instances containing any of the specified tags or only those that contain all of them. Only applicable if more than one value is entered in the Exclusion Tags field.
• Create Final Snapshot - Boolean for whether or not to take a final snapshot before deleting
• Automatic Actions - When this value is set, this policy will automatically take the selected action(s).

Please note that the "Automatic Actions" parameter contains a list of action(s) that can be performed on the resources. When it is selected, the policy will automatically execute the corresponding action on the data that failed the checks, post incident generation. Please leave it blank for manual action. For example if a user selects the "Delete Volumes" action while applying the policy, all the volumes that didn't satisfy the policy condition will be deleted.

Policy Actions

The following policy actions are taken on any resources found to be out of compliance.

• Delete Unused volumes after approval
• Send an email report

Prerequisites

This Policy Template uses Credentials for authenticating to datasources -- in order to apply this policy you must have a Credential registered in the system that is compatible with this policy. If there are no Credentials listed when you apply the policy, please contact your Flexera Org Admin and ask them to register a Credential that is compatible with this policy. The information below should be consulted when creating the credential(s).

• AWS Credential (provider=aws) which has the following permissions:
  • ec2:DescribeRegions
  • ec2:DescribeVolumes
  • ec2:DescribeSnapshots
  • cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics
  • cloudwatch:GetMetricData
  • ec2:CreateTags*
  • ec2:CreateSnapshot*
  • ec2:DetachVolume*
  • ec2:DeleteVolume*

* Only required for taking action; the policy will still function in a read-only capacity without these permissions.

Example IAM Permission Policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "ec2:DescribeRegions",
                "ec2:DescribeVolumes",
                "ec2:DescribeSnapshots",
                "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
                "cloudwatch:GetMetricData",
                "ec2:CreateTags",
                "ec2:CreateSnapshot",
                "ec2:DetachVolume",
                "ec2:DeleteVolume"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

• Flexera Credential (provider=flexera) which has the following roles:
  • billing_center_viewer

The Provider-Specific Credentials page in the docs has detailed instructions for setting up Credentials for the most common providers.

Supported Clouds

• AWS

Cost

This policy template does not incur any cloud costs.