Discover EC2 instances and databases on AWS
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This document describes how to run an inventory discovery on your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account by using the Migration Center discovery client CLI.

The mcdc CLI lets you collect information about your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) databases on AWS. The mcdc CLI then sends the collected information to Migration Center for assessment.

Information collected during inventory discovery

The mcdc CLI collects the following information from your EC2 instances:

Instance type, ID, name, and region.
Machine size, including CPU, memory, and storage size.
Operating system name, version, and architecture.
Power state (on or off).
Network interfaces and associated IP and MAC addresses.
Disk information, including interface type, volume type, label, and size.
Hyperthreading support.
Performance data for each EC2 instance:
- Input and output operations per second (IOPS)
- CPU utilization
- Network ingress and egress

The mcdc CLI collects the following information from your RDS databases:

Platform
Database engine
Name
Generated ID
Version
Edition
Disk allocated bytes
Physical core count
Memory bytes
Performance data for each database:
- Memory usage
- Disk IOPS
- Network ingress and egress
- CPU utilization

The mcdc CLI collects metrics for the last 30 days except for database memory usage. For database memory usage, AWS saves only up to 7 days of data by default, so the mcdc CLI collects data for only the last 7 days.

Supported databases

The following databases are supported:

Microsoft SQL Server
MySQL
PostgreSQL

Limitations

When running an inventory discovery on your AWS account, the mcdc CLI has the following limitations:

The following information for EC2 instances is not collected:
- Memory usage.
- Free disk space. To collect this information, run a guest discovery.
You cannot run the mcdc CLI on Linux machines to collect data from AWS Windows EC2 instances. To collect information from Windows EC2 instances, run the mcdc CLI on a Windows machine.

Before you begin

Before you begin the inventory discovery, make sure that you have completed the following steps:

Review the requirements for downloading and running the mcdc CLI.
Choose where to download the mcdc CLI and complete the steps to download the mcdc CLI.
Make sure that you have access to your AWS account.

Choose where to download the `mcdc` CLI

You can download the mcdc CLI to both Linux and Windows machines. We recommend using a Windows EC2 instance to download and run the mcdc CLI, because it supports all available collection methods.

You can download the mcdc CLI to a location with access to your target assets, such as the following:

AWS CloudShell
A Linux EC2 instance
A Windows EC2 instance
Any computer where you have installed the mcdc CLI and have remote access to your AWS account.

For instructions to download the mcdc CLI, see Download mcdc CLI.

Create an AWS IAM policy

To let the mcdc CLI read the EC2 and RDS inventory data, create an AWS IAM policy with the following permissions:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "ec2:DescribeRegions",
        "ec2:DescribeInstances",
        "ec2:DescribeVolumes",
        "ec2:DescribeInstanceTypes",
        "rds:DescribeDBInstances",
        "rds:DescribeDBEngineVersions",
        "ssm:DescribeInstanceInformation",
        "cloudwatch:GetMetricData"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Authenticate to AWS

To let the mcdc CLI access your AWS environment, authenticate your account using one of the following methods:

Use your existing AWS credentials
Create an access key for the mcdc CLI

Use your existing AWS credentials

To use your existing AWS credentials, run the mcdc CLI commands directly from the AWS Cloud Shell. If you run the mcdc CLI from the AWS Cloud Shell, you can use your existing credentials without an access key. In this case, the mcdc CLI can access your AWS environment to discover VM instances, as granted by your credentials.

Create an access key for the `mcdc` CLI

To create an access key for the mcdc CLI, follow these steps:

Create a dedicated IAM user to interact with the AWS API.
Attach the IAM policy you created in the previous section to your new user.
In the AWS console, navigate to the IAM user that you created in the previous step, and click User > Security Credentials > Create access key > Other > Next > Create access key.

For more information, see Create an access key.

Store the access key ID and access key. You need this information to scan your AWS inventory.

Optional: Set up access to collect guest operating system data

Guest operating system data enriches pricing reports, license reports, and asset details exports. This data also helps assess suitability for containerization journeys to Google Kubernetes Engine, GKE Autopilot, and Cloud Run. If you don't want to collect operating system data, you can skip this section.

To collect guest operating system data, the workstation running the mcdc CLI must connect to the target EC2 instances. Make sure that the following ports are open on the target EC2 instances:

Port 22 (SSH) for Linux machines
Port 135 (WMI) for Windows machines

Discover EC2 instances and RDS databases

To discover EC2 instances and RDS databases, follow these steps:

In the command line terminal, change to the directory where you downloaded the mcdc CLI.
Run the discovery:
AWS CloudShell
To discover EC2 instances and RDS databases in your AWS account, run the following command:
Linux

./mcdc discover aws --host-config
[--services AWS_SERVICE_NAME]
[--region AWS_REGION]

Windows

mcdc.exe discover aws --host-config
[--services AWS_SERVICE_NAME]
[--region AWS_REGION]
Replace the following:
- AWS_SERVICE_NAME: the AWS service name (rds or ec2). This flag is optional. If you don't provide this flag, both EC2 instances and RDS databases are discovered.
- AWS_REGION: the AWS region where your EC2 instances and RDS databases are located. This flag is optional. If you don't provide this flag, assets from all enabled AWS regions are discovered.
AWS access key
To discover EC2 instances and RDS databases by using your AWS access key ID and access key, run the following command:
Linux

./mcdc discover aws --access-key-id AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
--secret-access-key AWS_ACCESS_KEY
[--services AWS_SERVICE_NAME]
[--region AWS_REGION]

Windows

mcdc.exe discover aws --access-key-id AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
--secret-access-key AWS_ACCESS_KEY
[--services AWS_SERVICE_NAME]
[--region AWS_REGION]
Replace the following:
- AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: the access key ID you created in the Create an access key for the mcdc CLI section.
- AWS_ACCESS_KEY: the access key that you created in the Create an access key for the mcdc CLI section.
- AWS_SERVICE_NAME: the AWS service name (rds or ec2). This flag is optional. If you don't provide this flag, both EC2 instances and RDS databases are discovered.
- AWS_REGION: the AWS region where your EC2 instances and RDS databases are located. This flag is optional. If you don't provide this flag, assets from all enabled AWS regions are discovered.
The output should look similar to the following:
```
  [+] Collecting EC2...
  Collecting region eu-west-1
  Collected 73 EC2 instances
  [+] Collecting RDS...
  [+] Collecting region eu-west-1
  [✓] Collected 1 DB instances
  [✓] Collected total of 1 DB instances
  [✓] Collection completed.
```

To review the collected data, run the following command:

Linux

./mcdc discover ls

Windows

mcdc.exe discover ls

Optionally, use the --asset-types parameter to display only VMs or databases. For example, to display only VM instances, run discover ls --asset-types=vm; to display only databases, run discover ls --asset-types=db.

The output should look similar to the following:

    VM Assets
    PLATFORM VM ID       NAME              COLLECTED DATA   OS                          IP ADDRESSES
    i-011d6234b5769fe2a  abc-rhel9.0-arm   AWSVM            Red Hat Enterprise Linux    192.0.2.1
    i-08f7e5e469508460f  def-rhel9.0-arm   AWSVM            Red Hat Enterprise Linux    192.0.2.2
    i-09e28bb6eggg94db8  ghi-ol9.3         AWSVM            Linux/UNIX                  192.0.2.3

    Database Assets
    GENERATED ID                                         PROVIDER        ENGINE
    arn:aws:rds:eu-west-1:12345678912:db:abc-sqlserver   RDS             SQL Server

What's next

Learn how to run a guest discovery.
Learn how to export collected data to Migration Center.

Discover EC2 instances and databases on AWS Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.

Information collected during inventory discovery

Supported databases

Limitations

Before you begin

Choose where to download the mcdc CLI

Create an AWS IAM policy

Authenticate to AWS

Use your existing AWS credentials

Create an access key for the mcdc CLI

Optional: Set up access to collect guest operating system data

Discover EC2 instances and RDS databases

AWS CloudShell

Linux

Windows

AWS access key

Linux

Windows

Linux

Windows

What's next

Discover EC2 instances and databases on AWS
Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.

Choose where to download the `mcdc` CLI

Create an access key for the `mcdc` CLI