AWS Resource Explorer now provides immediate access to resource search and discovery capabilities in a Region. With this launch, you no longer need to activate Resource Explorer to discover your resources. Learn more

What is AWS Resource Explorer?

AWS Resource Explorer is a resource search and discovery service. With Resource Explorer, you can explore your resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, Amazon Kinesis streams, or Amazon DynamoDB tables, using an internet search engine-like experience. Resource Explorer allows you to easily search for your resources using resource metadata like names, tags, and IDs, and displays additional resource details from other AWS services, such as AWS Config and AWS Cloud Control. You can add resource metadata using tags, and collectively manage resources in an application. Resource Explorer works across AWS Regions in your account to simplify your cross-Region workloads.

AWS Resource Explorer provides fast responses to your search queries by using indexes that are created and maintained by the AWS Resource Explorer service. These indexes come in two types: Resource Explorer-owned indexes that provide immediate partial results, and user-owned indexes that provide complete results with automatic updates. Resource Explorer uses a variety of data sources to gather information about resources in your AWS account. Resource Explorer stores that information in the indexes for Resource Explorer to search.

Beginning October 6, 2025, Resource Explorer is enabled by default in your AWS account with no setup steps required to begin searching for and finding resources. When you first access Resource Explorer through the AWS Management Console, Unified Search, or CLI/SDK/API, you'll automatically receive search functionality based on your IAM permissions, as explained later in this page under Are you a first-time Resource Explorer user?. Resource Explorer provides immediate search results in each AWS Region you access, with Unified Search showing results from your current AWS Region without requiring any additional configuration.

For enhanced functionality, you can search across multiple AWS Regions by enabling cross-Region search with a single click or API call to select an aggregator AWS Region. Organizations can set up multi-account search by enabling trusted access and using AWS CloudFormation deployment. If you previously configured Resource Explorer with cross-Region search, your existing setup remains unchanged. You can now search for resources across hundreds of AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, Amazon Kinesis streams, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and more, without any initial configuration, making it easier to manage resources and troubleshoot issues from the moment you access your account.

Are you a first-time Resource Explorer user?

As a first-time user of Resource Explorer, you can start searching for resources immediately without any setup steps. You can access Resource Explorer through the AWS Management Console, Unified Search, or CLI/SDK/API to begin finding your resources.

Your search experience is automatically enabled based on your IAM permissions. If you have, at minimum, the permissions in the AWSResourceExplorerReadOnlyAccess managed policy, you can immediately search in partial results (all tagged resources and supported untagged resources created after the immediate resource discovery release). Resource Explorer uses a service-linked channel to receive AWS CloudTrail events on your behalf, and this visibility will be available in the CloudTrail console by end of October 2025 across all supported Regions. For complete resource inventory with automatic updates, you'll also need the iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole permission (included in the AWSResourceExplorerFullAccess managed policy). After the service-linked role is created in your account by any user, subsequent users only need the permissions in the AWSResourceExplorerReadOnlyAccess managed policy to get complete results on first search in subsequent Regions.

To get the most from Resource Explorer, we recommend starting with search and then exploring these topics as needed:

Features of Resource Explorer

Resource Explorer provides the following features:

Resource Explorer supported Regions

The following table provides information about the AWS Regions where Resource Explorer is available.

Related AWS services

The following are the other AWS services whose primary purpose is to help you manage your AWS resources:

myApplications in the AWS Management Console

myApplications is an extension of the AWS Management Console that helps you manage and monitor the cost, health, security posture, and performance of your applications in AWS. Applications allow you to group resources and metadata. From the AWS Management Console, you can access all of the applications in your account, view metrics across all applications, and review cost, security, and operations metrics from multiple AWS services in a single view. myApplications includes resource information from the following AWS services:

Pricing

Automatic setup and basic search functionality are available at no additional cost. There are no charges to search for resources by using AWS Resource Explorer, including creating views, completing setup in AWS Regions, or searching for resources.

In the process of building your resource inventory, Resource Explorer calls APIs on your behalf that may result in charges. Interacting with the resources that you find in your search results can result in usage charges that vary depending on the resource type and its AWS service. Some sources of additional data available in the Resource Explorer console are from other AWS services that can result in usage charges, such as AWS Config. These sources are only used if you explicitly enable them in your account. For more information about how AWS bills for the normal use of a specific resource type, refer to the documentation for that resource type's owning service.