Unused-resource scans run CloudBurn's discovery rules against a connected AWS account and surface resources that are costing money without doing work — unattached volumes, idle load balancers, stopped instances still billing for storage, and the rest of the discovery rule catalog. Results stay in your own S3 results bucket; CloudBurn reads them to render your dashboard but the data lives in your account.
Prerequisites
- A connected AWS account that shows Ready to scan — role access, storage, and Resource Explorer all verified
- A Pro or Enterprise plan — see Plans and billing
Every workspace member can run scans; connecting and verifying accounts is limited to owners and admins.
Running a scan
From Unused Resources in your dashboard, pick a verified account from the account selector and choose Run scan. Accounts that are not fully verified are listed but cannot be selected until you complete the missing checks on the AWS Accounts page.
A scan is queued, then runs against the account's region. Scans typically take a few minutes; you can leave the page and come back, and results refresh automatically. Only one scan can be queued or running per account at a time. If a scan cannot write to your bucket or Resource Explorer is missing in the region, the page tells you which piece to fix — usually redeploying the latest CloudBurn stack — before you scan again.
Reading the results
The Latest scan tab opens with four summary cards: when the scan completed, the number of Findings (and the distinct resources behind them), Checks triggered out of all checks that ran, and Services affected.
Failed checks groups findings by rule. Each group shows the rule name and description — the same rules the open-source toolkit runs, so the Rules documentation is the reference for what each finding means, why it matters, and how to remediate it — plus how many resources it found and a remediation effort badge (low, medium, or high) for triage: a low-effort finding like an unattached EBS volume is a five-minute win, while a high-effort one may need a migration plan.
Expand a group to see the resources by name, type, region, and age, or use Search all findings to look up a resource by name or ID across every rule. View details on a resource opens its ID, ARN, type, region, last activity or creation time, tags, and — for checks that have one — a copyable Remediation command. Review the resource before deleting it; CloudBurn never modifies your account.
Coverage
Below the findings, three sections grouped by AWS service explain what else the scan looked at:
| Section | What it lists |
|---|---|
| Checks with passing resources | Resources that passed each check. A resource can pass one check and have findings in another. |
| Unknown | Checks that lacked enough evidence to assess some resources, with the reason per service |
| Not applicable | Checks with no eligible resources in the region, or an explicit reason they could not run |
One common Unknown cause: Lambda memory recommendations require AWS Compute Optimizer enrollment, which CloudBurn does not turn on for you.
Scan history
The History tab keeps completed scans from the last 90 days, oldest first, with the findings count, resources checked, resources with and without findings, and the check outcomes (passed, failed, unknown, not applicable) for each run. Two charts track resource and check outcomes over time. Choose View findings on any row to reopen that scan's results.
Results older than 7 days are flagged as getting old, and after 90 days they expire — run a new scan to refresh the account.
Platform scan vs. CLI discovery
The scan is the managed equivalent of running cloudburn discover yourself: same rules, same findings, but CloudBurn operates the scan through the read-only role instead of your local AWS credentials, and keeps history in your results bucket.
What's next
| Read this | To learn |
|---|---|
| Rules documentation | What every rule checks and how to remediate findings |
| Connect an AWS account | Add another account to scan |
| CLI discover command | The self-hosted equivalent of these scans |