Find your Amazon EC2 resources

Searching by keyword is a free text search that lets you search for a value across all of your resources' attributes or tags, without specifying an attribute or tag key to search.

To search by keyword, enter or paste what you’re looking for in the search field, and then choose Enter. For example, searching for 123 matches all instances that have 123 in any of their attributes, such as an IP address, instance ID, VPC ID, or AMI ID, or in any of their tags, such as the Name. If your free text search returns unexpected matches, apply additional filters.

Searching by an attribute lets you search a specific attribute across all of your resources.

For example, you can search the Instance state attribute for all of your instances to return only instances that are in the stopped state. To do this:

Searching by a tag lets you filter the resources in the currently displayed table by a tag key or a tag value.

Tag searches use either API filtering or client filtering, depending on the settings in the Preferences window.

When searching by tag, you can use the following values:

Inverse searches let you search for resources that do not match a specified value. In the Instances and AMIs screens, inverse searches are performed by selecting the != (Does not equal) or !: (Does not contain) operator and then selecting a value. In other screens, inverse searches are performed by prefixing the search keyword with the exclamation mark (!) character.

For example, you can search the Instance state attribute for all of your instances to exclude all instances that are in the terminated state. To do this:

To filter instances based on an instance state attribute, you can also use the search icons ( ) in the Instance state column. The search icon with a plus sign ( + ) displays all the instances that match that attribute. The search icon with a minus sign ( - ) excludes all instances that match that attribute.

Here is another example of using the inverse search: To list all instances that are not assigned the security group named launch-wizard-1, under Client filters, search by the Security group name attribute, choose !=, and in the search bar, enter launch-wizard-1.

With partial searches, you can search for partial string values. To perform a partial search, enter only a part of the keyword that you want to search for. On the Instances and AMIs screens, partial searches can only be performed with the : (Contains) operator. On other screens, you can select the client filter attribute and immediately enter only a part of the keyword that you want to search for. For example, on the Instance type screen, to search for all t2.micro, t2.small, and t2.medium instances, search by the Instance Type attribute, and for the keyword, enter t2.

To use regular expression searches, you must select the Use regular expression matching checkbox in the Preferences window.

Regular expressions are useful when you need to match the values in a field with a specific pattern. For example, to search for a value that starts with s, search for ^s. To search for a value that ends with xyz, search for xyz$. Or to search for a value that starts with a number that is followed by one or more characters, search for [0-9]+.*.

To use case-sensitive searches, you must select the Use case sensitive matching checkbox in the Preferences window. The case-sensitive preference only applies to client and tag filters.

Use the * wildcard to match zero or more characters. Use the ? wildcard to match zero or one character. For example, if you have a data set with the values prod, prods, and production, a search of prod* matches all values, whereas prod? matches only prod and prods. To use the literal values, escape them with a backslash (\). For example, "prod\*" would match prod*.

In general, multiple filters with the same attribute are automatically joined with OR. For example, searching for Instance State : Running and Instance State : Stopped returns all instances that are either running OR stopped. To join search with AND, search across different attributes. For example, searching for Instance State : Running and Instance Type : c4.large returns only instances that are of type c4.large AND that are in the running state.