Check when an Amazon EC2 AMI was last used - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Check when an Amazon EC2 AMI was last used

Amazon EC2 automatically tracks the date and time when an AMI was last used to launch an instance. If you have an AMI that has not been used to launch an instance in a long time, consider whether the AMI is a good candidate for deregistration or deprecation.

Considerations

  • When an AMI is used to launch an instance, there is a 24-hour delay before that usage is reported.

  • You must be the owner of the AMI to get the last launched time.

  • AMI usage data is available starting April 2017.

Console
To view the last launched time of an AMI

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the left navigation pane, choose AMIs.

  3. From the filter bar, choose Owned by me.

  4. Select the checkbox for the AMI.

  5. On the Details tab, find Last launched time.

AWS CLI
To view the last launched time by describing the AMI

Use the following describe-images command. If LastLaunchedTime is not present in the output, verify that you own the AMI.

aws ec2 describe-images \
    --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 \
    --query Images[].LastLaunchedTime \
    --output text

The following is example output.

2025-02-17T20:22:19Z
To view the last launched time attribute of an AMI

Use the following describe-image-attribute command. You must be the owner of the specified AMI.

aws ec2 describe-image-attribute \
    --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 \
    --attribute lastLaunchedTime \
    --query LastLaunchedTime.Value \
    --output text

The following is example output.

2025-02-17T20:22:19Z
PowerShell
To view the last launched time by describing the AMI

Use the following Get-EC2Image cmdlet. If LastLaunchedTime is not present in the output, verify that you own the AMI.

(Get-EC2Image -ImageId ami-0abcdef1234567890).LastLaunchedTime

The following is example output.

2025-02-17T20:22:19Z
To view the last launched time attribute of an AMI

Use the following Get-EC2ImageAttribute cmdlet. You must be the owner of the specified AMI.

(Get-EC2ImageAttribute `
    -ImageId ami-0abcdef1234567890 `
    -Attribute LastLaunchedTime).LastLaunchedTime

The following is example output.

2025-02-17T20:22:19Z