Turning on Resource Explorer in an AWS Region to
index your resources
When you initially turn on AWS Resource Explorer in your AWS account, you created indexes for the
service in one or more AWS Regions. If you used the Quick setup option,
Resource Explorer automatically created indexes in all AWS Regions that are turned on in your
AWS account. The Resource Explorer service also promoted the index in the specified
Region to be the aggregator index for the
account. If you used the Advanced setup option, you specified the Regions in which to
create indexes.
When you turn on Resource Explorer in an AWS Region, the service performs the following
actions:
-
When you start Resource Explorer in the first Region in an AWS account, Resource Explorer creates a
service-linked role in the
account named AWSServiceRoleForResourceExplorer. This role grants permissions for
Resource Explorer to discover and index the resources in your account by using services such as
AWS CloudTrail and the tagging service. Creation of the service-linked role
happens only when you register the first AWS Region in the account. Resource Explorer uses the
same service-linked role for all additional Regions that you add later.
-
Resource Explorer creates an index in the specified Region to store the details about that
Region's resources.
-
Resource Explorer begins discovering the resources in the specified Region and adds the
information it finds about them to that Region's index.
-
If your account already contains an
aggregator index in a different Region, Resource Explorer starts replicating the
information from the new Region's index to the aggregator index to support
cross-Region search.
When those steps are complete, information about your resources is available to be
discovered by users. They can search by using one of the views defined in either the same Region or the Region that contains the
aggregator index.
Create a Resource Explorer index in a Region
You can create a Resource Explorer index in an additional AWS Region by using the AWS Management Console, by
using commands in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or by using API operations in an AWS SDK. You
can create only one index in a Region.
Minimum permissions
To perform the steps in the following procedure, you must have the following
permissions:
- AWS Management Console
-
To create a Resource Explorer index in an AWS Region
-
On the Resource Explorer Settings page.
-
In the Indexes section, choose
Create indexes.
-
On the Create indexes page, select the check
boxes next to the AWS Regions in which you want to create an index
to support searching that Region's resources. Unavailable check
boxes indicate Regions that already contain a Resource Explorer index.
-
(Optional) In the Tags section, you can
specify tag key and value pairs to the index.
-
Choose Create indexes.
Resource Explorer displays a green banner at the top of the page to indicate
success, or a red banner if there is an error creating an index in
one or more of the selected Regions.
Tagged resources local to the index appear in search results
within a few minutes. Untagged resources typically take less than two hours to appear, but can
take longer when there is heavy demand. It can also can take up to an hour to complete the
initial replication to a new aggregator index from all of the existing local indexes.
Next step – If you already created an aggregator index,
then the new Regions automatically begin to replicate their index
information to the aggregator index. If that is where your users do all of
their searching, then the resources in the new Region appear in those search
results and you're done.
However, if you want users to be able to search for resources in only the newly
indexed Region, then you must also create a view for users in that Region
and grant your users permissions to that view. For instructions on how to
create a view, see Managing Resource Explorer views to provide access to search.
- AWS CLI
-
To create a Resource Explorer index in an AWS Region
Run the following command for each AWS Region in which you want to
create an index to support searching that Region's resources. The
following example command registers Resource Explorer in the US East (N. Virginia)
(us-east-1).
$ aws resource-explorer-2 create-index \
--region us-east-1
{
"Arn": "arn:aws:resource-explorer-2:us-east-1:123456789012:index/1a2b3c4d-5d6e-7f8a-9b0c-abcd11111111",
"CreatedAt": "2022-11-01T20:00:59.149Z",
"State": "CREATING"
}
Repeat this command for each Region in which you want to turn on Resource Explorer,
substituting the appropriate Region code for the --region
parameter.
Because Resource Explorer performs some of the index creation as asynchronous tasks
in the background, the response can be CREATING, which
indicates that the background processes are not yet complete.
Tagged resources local to the index appear in search results
within a few minutes. Untagged resources typically take less than two hours to appear, but can
take longer when there is heavy demand. It can also can take up to an hour to complete the
initial replication to a new aggregator index from all of the existing local indexes.
You can check for final completion by running the following command, and
checking for the ACTIVE state.
$ aws resource-explorer-2 get-index \
--region us-east-1
{
"Arn": "arn:aws:resource-explorer-2:us-east-1:123456789012:index/1a2b3c4d-5d6e-7f8a-9b0c-abcd11111111",
"CreatedAt": "2022-07-12T18:59:10.503000+00:00",
"LastUpdatedAt": "2022-07-13T18:41:58.799000+00:00",
"ReplicatingFrom": [],
"State": "ACTIVE",
"Tags": {},
"Type": "LOCAL"
}
Next step – If you already created an aggregator index,
then the new Regions automatically begin to replicate their index
information to the aggregator index. If that is where your users do all of
their searching, then the resources in the new Region appear in those search
results and you're done.
However, if you want users to be able to search for resources in only the newly
indexed Region, then you must also create a view for users in that Region
and grant your users permissions to that view. For instructions on how to
create a view, see Managing Resource Explorer views to provide access to search.
