Can't find an instance I'm being billed for

Question

Cost Explorer says I'm being billed in the US-West-2 region for a t3.medium at a rate of $1 per day.  However, looking at the US-West-2 EC2 dashboard, I have no running instances, no reserved instances or capacity reservations.  The usage type displayed in Cost Explorer is "USW2-BoxUsage:t3.medium" and started in March.  How can I find and kill this phantom box that I'm not using?

I have 2 cloudformation stacks, but between them they contain only a `AWS::Config::ConfigurationAggregator`, a `AWS::CloudTrail::Trail` and a `AWS::Logs::LogGroup`... also these were created in January, while the phantom box started showing up in March.

Answer

Are you looking at your Cost Explorer daily view or monthly view? And this "USW2-BoxUsage:t3.medium" usage is continuing throughout May right now? Or for example, you see this usage under the month of March and maybe April, but it's no longer running in May?

"BoxUsage" should be a running on-demand EC2 instance. Make sure when you go to the EC2 console to view your EC2 instances in us-west-2 region, that you remove any filters (i.e. not only view running instances, but also view stopped and terminated instances). What if this instance is on schedule, and is being turned on during certain times, and you have a filter to view only running instances in your EC2 console. If you still can't find the resource, but you are still being charged for it every day, please open a billing support case from your account, and our support team should be able to take a look at your account and advise what could be the case.

Answer

Don't you use somewhere a managed service (RDS, Elasticache, etc.) relying under the cover on Ec2 instances?

Can't find an instance I'm being billed for

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