A Parsivex scan is a read-only analysis of your AWS account. It pulls billing, inventory, and usage data, checks your resources for waste, enriches findings with plain-English explanations, and produces a savings report. This article explains what happens during a scan.
What data Parsivex collects
Parsivex reads three categories of AWS data during every scan:
| Data source | What we collect | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Cost Explorer | Monthly and daily spend by service, reservation utilization, Savings Plans coverage | Cost-based findings (NAT Gateway overuse, Reserved Instance opportunities) and report context |
| Resource inventory | EC2 instances, EBS volumes and snapshots, Elastic IPs, RDS databases, Lambda functions, S3 buckets, Elastic Load Balancers, DynamoDB tables | Identifying unused, idle, or oversized resources |
| CloudWatch metrics | CPU, network, request counts, and related utilization signals over a trailing window | Distinguishing idle resources from actively used ones |
All access is read-only through your cross-account IAM role. Parsivex never modifies AWS resources during a scan.
Parsivex does not read S3 object contents, database rows, application logs, or secrets. See What data can Parsivex see? for the full breakdown.
What happens during a scan
After you click Start Scan, Parsivex starts the scan in the background and runs these steps in order:
Inventory collection
Lists resources in your account: EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, EBS, Elastic IPs, load balancers, and DynamoDB tables. Per-resource API errors (for example, access denied on a single bucket) are logged and skipped — they do not fail the scan.
Metrics collection
Pulls CloudWatch utilization metrics for running EC2 instances, active RDS databases, invoked Lambda functions, provisioned DynamoDB tables, and load balancers. Missing metrics for one resource do not stop the scan.
Cost Explorer data
Fetches account-level billing and cost breakdowns. If Cost Explorer is unavailable (not enabled or access denied), the scan continues with empty cost data and records a partial scan warning.
Waste detection
Checks for specific waste patterns — idle EC2, orphaned EBS volumes, oversized RDS, and more. A single check failing is logged but does not fail the scan.
Plain-English explanations
Adds clear descriptions and remediation guidance to each finding.
Report generation
Sorts findings by estimated savings, computes totals, and saves your report. If warnings were recorded, they appear on the report and scan results page.
The progress screen groups these stages into three user-facing phases:
| Progress | Phase label | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| 0–33% | Collecting data | Inventory, metrics, and Cost Explorer |
| 34–66% | Analysing | Waste detection and remediation script generation |
| 67–100% | Building report | Report assembly and recommendations |
How long scans take
Most scans finish in a few minutes. Duration depends on how many resources you have and how responsive AWS APIs are at the time. Large accounts with hundreds of EC2 instances or many S3 buckets may take longer because metrics and bucket checks run per resource.
You can leave the progress page and come back — the scan continues in the background. When it finishes, your dashboard and scan history update automatically.
What "complete" means
A scan is complete when:
- All scan steps finish without a fatal error
- The scan finishes with 100% progress
- A savings report is generated and linked from your dashboard
A complete scan may still have partial scan warnings if some data sources were unavailable. Warnings mean coverage was incomplete — not that the scan failed.
A scan is failed when a required step cannot finish (for example, inventory collection for a core service like EC2 or RDS returns a hard error). Failed scans show an error message and a Try Again button. They do not generate a new report and do not mark previous findings as resolved. See Finding lifecycle for how resolution works.
Regions scanned
Parsivex covers your account at two scopes:
| Scope | What is scanned |
|---|---|
| Account-wide | Cost Explorer billing data (spend across all AWS regions where you have usage), S3 bucket inventory (buckets are global) |
| Regional | EC2, RDS, Lambda, ELB, DynamoDB, EBS, and CloudWatch metrics in your workspace default region — the region you chose during onboarding or set in Integrations (/integrations) |
Pick the region where most of your compute resources live. If you run workloads in multiple regions, resources outside your default region are not included in regional inventory until you change the default region and run another scan.
If you are unsure which region to pick, check the AWS Console region selector or look at where your production EC2 and RDS instances run. Cost Explorer data is always account-wide regardless of the region setting.
After the scan
Once complete, you can:
- View your savings report with findings sorted by estimated monthly savings
- Dismiss or snooze findings that are intentional — see Finding lifecycle
- Run remediation scripts on paid plans — see Remediation script safety
Related articles
- Partial scan warnings — Why scans can be incomplete and how to fix warnings
- Severity and savings estimates — How findings are prioritized and savings are calculated
- Your first scan — Step-by-step walkthrough from dashboard to report
- Connection troubleshooting — Fix IAM permission issues that cause partial scans