Ghostwriter can track cloud resources used for projects. If you provide access tokens for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Digital Ocean (DO), Ghostwriter has a task that will collect all running server instances and check if any of them are attached to a completed project.

The task will report back with JSON detailing your active (powered-on) cloud servers. If you have Slack enabled, Ghostwriter will send notifications to let you know if an active cloud server is not tracked as part of a project or is tracked as part of a project that has ended.

​
Ignoring Specific Assets

You may spin up cloud servers on the same account that you do not want to be monitored. You can tag these servers with an “ignore tag” of your choosing. Provide a comma-separated list of tags for Ghostwriter to ignore when checking cloud assets.

If you use Slack notifications to send reminders to teardown cloud infrastructure, you can also provide a notification delay in days. Ghostwriter will wait to send reminders until a project’s end date + your delay.

This task is under development to support monitoring Microsoft Azure and additional AWS resources (e.g., Elastic IPs).

​
Configuring AWS Keys

Ghostwriter is designed to use minimal AWS privileges so you do not need to assign any serious privileges to the keys you use for monitoring your AWS resources. Ghostwriteraccesses and reads from the following services:

  • STS – Ghostwriter connects and calls get-caller-identity to test your keys

  • Lightsail – Collects your running Lightsail instances and related identifiers

  • EC2 – Collects your running EC2 instances and related identifiers

  • S3 – Collects your list of buckets

Keep Ghostwriter’s privileges limited. Ghostwriter does not need to be able to upload files to S3 or modify instances, or access storage volumes. The monitoring task only needs to read resource information (i.e., use “Get,” “List,” and “Describe” permissions).

Fetching instance information from Lightdail and EC2 requires specifying a region. To determine which regions your account has enabled, Ghostwriter calls EC2’s describe-regions and Lightsail’s get-regions.

Then, Ghostwriter uses an EC2 resource to call instances and a Lightsail client to call get-instances to build a list of instances. This data includes:

  • ARN

  • Name

  • State

  • Private IP(s)

  • Public IP(s)

  • LaunchTime

  • Tags

  • Misc. Networking and Hardware

For S3, Ghostwriter calls list-buckets to get a list of all buckets. This data includes the bucket’s name and the date it was created.