Creating Resource Explorer views to use for search - Amazon Resource Explorer
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Creating Resource Explorer views to use for search

All searches must use a view. A view defines filters that determine which resources can be returned by queries that use the view. Views are also the resource to which the administrator must grant permissions to control who can use which view.

A view is stored in an Amazon Web Services Region, and returns search results from only that Region's index. If the Region contains the aggregator index, then the view returns search results from the index in every Region in the account.

Amazon Resource Explorer can create a default view for you during initial set up if you chose the relevant options in either Quick setup or Advanced setup. At any later time, you can create additional views that have different filters for different sets of users.

You can create a view by using the Amazon Web Services Management Console or by running Amazon CLI commands or their equivalent API operations in an Amazon SDK.

Minimum permissions

To run this procedure, you must have the following permissions:

  • Action: resource-explorer-2:CreateView

    Resource: * (to create a view in any Region) or the ARN of the index in the Amazon Web Services Region in which you want to allow the user to create a view

Amazon Web Services Management Console
To create a view

  1. Open the Resource Explorer console Views page and choose Create view.

  2. On the Create view page, for Name, enter a name for the view.

    The name must be no more than 64 characters long, and can include letters, digits, and the dash (-) character. The name must be unique within its Amazon Web Services Region.

  3. Choose the Amazon Web Services Region in which you want to create the view. To create a view that returns resources from all Regions in the account, choose the Amazon Web Services Region that contains the aggregator index.

  4. Choose whether to filter the results.

    • Include all resources

      No query filters are included. All resources in the index associated with the view can be returned in search results.

    • Include only resources that match a specified filter

      Turns on the Resource filters check box where you can choose filter names and operators. For an explanation of each of the available filter names and operators, see Filters.

    • Choose the optional resource attributes to include in results from this view. Select the check box next to Tags to let users search for resources based on their tag key names and values. If you don't include tags in the view then users can't make search requests that use tag keys and values to further filter the results.

    • Optionally, you can attach tags to the view. Expand the Tags box, and enter up to 50 tag key/value pairs. You can use tags to categorize resources, or as part of an attribute-based access control (ABAC) security permission strategy. For more information, see Adding tags to views.

    • Choose Create view.

    The console returns to the Search page where you can use your new view to perform a search.

    Next step: Grant the principals in your account permissions to search with your new view. For more information, see Granting access to Resource Explorer views for search

Amazon CLI
To create a view

Run the following command to create a view in the specified Amazon Web Services Region. The following example creates a view that returns only resources related to the Amazon EC2 service that are tagged with a Stage key and the value prod.

$ aws resource-explorer-2 create-view \
    --region us-west-2 \
    --view-name "My-EC2-Prod-Resources" \
    --filters FilterString="service:ec2 tag:stage=prod" \
    --included-properties Name=tags
{
    "View": {
        "Filters": {
            "FilterString": "service:ec2 tag:stage=prod"
        },
        "IncludedProperties": [
            {
                "Name": "tags"
            }
        ],
        "LastUpdatedAt": "2022-08-03T16:13:37.625000+00:00",
        "Owner": "123456789012",
        "Scope": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:root",
        "ViewArn": "arn:aws:resource-explorer-2:us-west-2:123456789012:view/My-EC2-Prod-Resources/1a2b3c4d-5d6e-7f8a-9b0c-abcd11111111"
    }
}

Next step: Grant the principals in your account permissions to search with your new view. For more information, see Granting access to Resource Explorer views for search