Analyze Amazon EC2 instances with low CPU utilization

Cost optimization refers to following certain techniques to bring down cloud expenditure. Organizations do not prefer to spend unnecessarily on cloud resources which are not reaping any benefits to them. Managing unused resources, especially that of Amazon EC2 is considered one of the best cost optimization practices to cut down your unnecessary costs and reduce your cloud billing.

AWS EC2 is one if the most widely used services. If you have underutilized EC2 resources in your cloud infrastructure, then you should think about cutting down unnecessary dollars you are paying for those resources. Your current cloud bill can significantly decrease if your EC2 resources are managed properly.

Why Amazon EC2 instances with low CPU utilization needs to be analyzed?

Imagine a scenario where there are thousands of EC2 instances deployed which perform daily crucial operations of an organization. Many instances amongst them might have low CPU utilization. Identifying all those instances and taking necessary actions against them such as increasing their workload to make the most out of it or to terminate those instances can help you in managing your cloud resources as well as your cloud billing.

That said, Centilytics provides a dedicated insight which identifies all your Amazon EC2 instances having low CPU usage which helps you in optimizing your cloud expenditure.

To know more about Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and its instance generation upgrade, read this insider piece.

Insight descriptions:

There can be only 1 possible scenario:

Severity	Description
Critical	This indication will be displayed when the corresponding EC2 instance has 10% or less daily average CPU utilization and 5 MB or less network I/O on at least 4 of the previous 14 days.

Descriptions of further columns are as follows:

1. Account Id: This column shows the respective account ID of the user’s account.
2. Account Name: This column shows the corresponding account name to the user’s account.
3. Region: This column shows the region in which the corresponding EC2 instance exists.
4. Identifier: This column shows the unique instance ID of the instance.
5. Instance type: This column shows the type of instance.

Filters applicable:

Filter Name	Description
Account Id	Applying the account Id filter will display all resources for the selected account Id.
Region	Applying the region filter will display all the resources corresponding to the selected region.
Severity	Applying severity filter will display resources according to the selected severity type i.e. selecting critical will display all instances with critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning and Ok severity types.
Resource Tags	Applying resource tags filter will display those resources which have been assigned the selected resource tag. For e.g., If the user has tagged some public snapshots by a resource tag named environment, then selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all those resources tagged by the tag name environment
Resource Tags Value	Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. – Let’s say a user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has a value say production (environment: production). Hence, the user can view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment:production”. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided.

 

Compliances covered:

Compliance Name	Reference No.	Link
Trusted Advisor	–	https://console.aws.amazon.com/trustedadvisor/home?#/category/cost-optimizing