EBS volumes attached but seeing no reads or writes
Being attached to a running instance is not the same as being in use. The volume bills its provisioned size either way.
What this problem is
An orphan volume is easy to spot: it is attached to nothing. A volume attached to a running instance, by contrast, looks in service by every signal the console offers — and may not be. What separates the two cases is not attachment state, it is I/O activity.
Such a volume usually has a history: it was the data disk of an application that moved elsewhere, the partition of a service decommissioned without powering down the host, the mount point of a backup job that stopped running. The instance stays up for other reasons, the volume stays attached, and nothing has read from or written to it in months.
Here the fix calls for more care than elsewhere on this list, which is why this finding lands as a decision rather than a command: a volume with no I/O in thirty days might be a monthly backup target, an archive mounted on demand, or a recovery disk. Detaching from a running machine breaks whatever depends on it. Confirm before acting.
How we detect it
We cross the volumes from DescribeVolumes with the instances from DescribeInstances to find those attached to running machines, and read the per-volume read and write operation metrics CloudWatch collects across a thirty-day window.
- Attached EBS volumes nobody uses
What it costs
The volume bills its provisioned size regardless of I/O: about $0.08 per GB-month on gp3 and $0.10 on gp2 (us-east-1). A dormant 500 GB data disk costs roughly $40 a month.
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
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