Waste Detection
The Waste Detection engine is the core diagnostic module of AWS Doctor. It scans your account for “zombie” resources—assets that are active and billing but provide zero value to your business.
How to Run
Use the waste subcommand to trigger a full scan across all supported services:
aws-doctor waste --region us-east-1
Selective Scanning
If you only want to scan specific AWS services, you can pass them as arguments to the subcommand. This is useful for faster execution or targeted cleanups.
Currently supported filters are ec2, s3, elb, cloudwatch, and rds.
# Example: Scan only EC2 and S3 resources
aws-doctor waste ec2 s3 --region us-east-1
# Note: Comma-separated lists also work for backward compatibility
# aws-doctor waste ec2,s3Categories of Detection
We group waste into four primary infrastructure categories:
Compute & EBS
Instances stopped for >30 days, orphaned volumes, stale snapshots, and expired RIs.
Databases
Stopped RDS instances, manual snapshots older than 30 days, and idle database instances.
Storage & Logs
Buckets without lifecycle policies, hidden incomplete multipart uploads, and Log Groups with no retention.
Networking
Unassociated Elastic IPs and Load Balancers with no healthy targets.
Why automate this?
In large organizations, developers often create temporary resources (testing an AMI, spinning up a sandbox EIP) and forget to delete them. Over time, these small charges aggregate into thousands of dollars of “infrastructure debt.”
AWS Doctor makes it trivial to run a weekly checkup and keep your account lean.