Configuration Item

Overview

A configuration item is a point-in-time snapshot of the attributes of a supported AWS resource in your account. It contains key components such as metadata, attributes, relationships, current configuration, and related events.

  • AWS Config automatically creates a configuration item whenever it detects a change in a recorded resource.

    • Example: If AWS Config is tracking Amazon S3 buckets, it generates a configuration item whenever a bucket is created, updated, or deleted.

  • Additionally, you can set a custom recording frequency to create configuration items at regular intervals, even if no changes occur.

A configuration item consists of the following components.

Component
Description
Contains

Metadata

Information about this configuration item

  • Version ID

  • Time when the configuration item was captured

  • Status of the configuration item indicating whether the item was captured successfully

  • State ID indicating the ordering of the configuration items of a resource

Attributes

Resource attributes

  • Resource ID

  • List of key–value tags for this resource

  • Resource type (see Supported Resource Types)

  • Amazon Resource Name (ARN)

  • Availability Zone that contains this resource, if applicable

  • Time the resource was created

Relationships

How the resource is related to other resources associated with the account

Description of the relationship, such as Amazon EBS volume vol-1234567 is attached to an Amazon EC2 instance i-a1b2c3d4

Current configuration

Information returned through a call to the Describe or List API of the resource

For example, DescribeVolumes API returns the following information about the volume:

  • Availability Zone the volume is in

  • Time the volume was attached

  • ID of the EC2 instance it is attached to

  • Current status of the volume

  • State of DeleteOnTermination flag

  • Device the volume is attached to

  • Type of volume, such as gp2, io1, or standard

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