aws cli: EC2: get the state of list of instances

Question

I am trying to get the status of few EC2 instance using AWS CLI

   aws ec2 describe-instance-status --instance-ids xxxxxx yyyyyyyy zzzzzzzz

But in the output It only lists the instances which are running and not which are stopped.

How can i view the instances state even they are running or stopped

Answer 1

There are different ways to check the instance-state.

Use:

describe-instance-status.

You can use describe-instance-status: The describe-instance-status command of the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is used to retrieve the status of one or more Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. By default, it returns the status of running instances. To include stopped instances in the returned status information, you can use the --include-all-instances option.

Here is an example of how you can use this option:

$ aws ec2 describe-instance-status --include-all-instances

the above command will return the status information for both running and stopped instances.

Note that you can also filter the returned results using the --filters option. For example, you can use the following command to only retrieve the status of stopped instances:

$aws ec2 describe-instance-status --filters "Name=instance-state-code,Values=80"

Note: here 80 is the code for stopped instances and 16 for running ones. Below one will give you the info about stopped instance .

$ aws ec2 describe-instance-status --include-all-instances --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values='stopped'

You can get both the running as well as stooped instance-state while including the option --include-all-instances as used in the below given example...

$ aws ec2 describe-instance-status --include-all-instances --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values='*' --query 'InstanceStatuses[*].{InstanceId: InstanceId, State: InstanceState.Name}' --profile lab--output table


------------------------------------
|      DescribeInstanceStatus      |
+----------------------+-----------+
|      InstanceId      |   State   |
+----------------------+-----------+
|  i-0a4209dkc6549a2ea |  running  |
|  i-09379cj420ed015f2 |  running  |
|  i-0c9e1100de0105ed6 |  stopped  |
|  i-0f57b147ea9124344 |  running  |
|  i-02e4cbcbe10cb5e79 |  stopped  |
+----------------------+-----------+

describe-instances.

You can check the instance-state-name regardless of the state of the instance (pending | running | shutting-down | terminated | stopping | stopped ) while using with describe-instances.

$ aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[].Instances[*].{InstanceType: InstanceType, InstanceId: InstanceId, State: State.Name}' --profile lab --output table
----------------------------------------------------
|                 DescribeInstances                |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|      InstanceId      | InstanceType   |  State   |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|  i-0a4209dkc6549a2ea |  t3.xlarge     |  running |
|  i-09379cj420ed015f2 |  t2.small      |  running |
|  i-0c9e1100de0105ed6 |  m5.xlarge     |  stopped |
|  i-0f57b147ea9124344 |  c6i.xlarge    |  running |
|  i-02e4cbcbe10cb5e79 |  t1.micro      |  stopped |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+

However, you can get a specific state of an instance using --filers and --query, for example, if you are looking for only a stopped instance then you can use like below...

$ aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=stopped  --query 'Reservations[].Instances[*].{InstanceType: InstanceType, InstanceId: InstanceId, State: State.Name}' --profile lab --output table
----------------------------------------------------
|                 DescribeInstances                |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|      InstanceId      | InstanceType   |  State   |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|  i-0c9e1100de0105ed6 |  m5.xlarge     |  stopped |
|  i-02e4cbcbe10cb5e79 |  t1.micro      |  stopped |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+

In a similar fashion, you can check only the running instance …

$ aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running  --query 'Reservations[].Instances[*].{InstanceType: InstanceType, InstanceId: InstanceId, State: State.Name}' --profile lab --output table
----------------------------------------------------
|                 DescribeInstances                |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|      InstanceId      | InstanceType   |  State   |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+
|  i-0a4209dkc6549a2ea |  t3.xlarge     |  running |
|  i-09379cj420ed015f2 |  t2.small      |  running |
+----------------------+----------------+----------+

Note:

Further, I personally like to dictionary format along with tabular output(--output table) while using AWS CLI to get the values in nice tabular form which is easy for readability, hence the same here to get the values of the instance-state in a hash form (i.e., a dictionary or associative array), you I have combined that with the --query to get a nicer readable output.

Answer 2

Yes, if you pass the --include-all-instances option to the command it will also show stopped instances

From AWS documentation about the describe-instance-status command:

--include-all-instances | --no-include-all-instances (boolean)

When true , includes the health status for all instances. When false, includes the health status for running instances only.

Default: false