Amazon EBS Volume
Does ZopNight manage Amazon EBS Volume?
An EBS volume bills for every provisioned GB-month from creation until deletion, attached or not. A 500 GB volume costs the same full or empty. ZopNight inventories volumes every 6 hours, ties cost to each one, and flags orphaned volumes, gp2-to-gp3 migrations, and over-provisioned IOPS.
Rules that fire on Amazon EBS Volume
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Scheduling notes | discovery, metrics, cost tracking, and recommendations only. |
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes provide persistent block storage for EC2, billed per provisioned GB-month plus provisioned IOPS. Volumes keep billing after their instance is terminated, and older gp2 volumes cost more than equivalent gp3.
Provisioned, not used, is what bills
An EBS volume bills for the gigabytes you provisioned, not the gigabytes you filled: a 500 GB volume holding 40 GB bills for 500. On io1 and io2, provisioned IOPS carry their own per-IOPS-month meter; on gp3, IOPS above the included 3,000 baseline and throughput above the 125 MB/s baseline bill separately. The meter starts at creation and runs until the volume is deleted.
Detachment does not stop the bill
The costliest EBS misconception: a volume detached from its instance, or one that survived an instance termination because DeleteOnTermination was off, bills at exactly the same rate as an attached one. Orphaned volumes are invisible in day-to-day work and accumulate for years, which is why they are a standing item in almost every cloud cost audit.
Recurring waste
Orphaned volumes left behind by terminated instances. gp2 volumes paying a higher per-GB rate than gp3 for identical capacity. Since gp2 ties IOPS to size, large gp2 volumes often overpay on both axes. And io1 or io2 volumes provisioned for a peak IOPS figure that 90 days of monitoring shows is never approached.
What ZopNight tracks per volume
Volumes are inventoried every 6 hours, with hourly CloudWatch metrics from the EBS namespace kept over a 90-day lookback and per-volume cost attributed from Cost Explorer or CUR 2.0. Recommendations cover unattached volumes, gp2-to-gp3 migration, and over-provisioned IOPS. Volumes cannot be scheduled, because block storage has no off state, so cost only falls when a volume is deleted, shrunk via snapshot-and-recreate, or migrated to a cheaper type.
The fastest audit in the console
EC2 console, then Elastic Block Store, then Volumes. Filter the State column to Available to list unattached volumes; that is the single fastest EBS audit there is.