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Cost Saving Opportunities Page

Cost Saving Opportunities (CSO) provides an easily scannable overview of potential savings on your cloud spend.

From this page you can view recommendations for savings regarding idle resources and right-sized resources.

Some things you can do with CSO reports:

  • View a summary of potential cost savings on a dashboard

  • Identify Idle Resources that might be removed or reassigned

  • Determine which resources are being under- or over-utilized and might be resized to potentially improve performance or reduce costs

  • Track short and long-term spending trends with the period comparison view

  • Compare the cost of a certain service in relation to your whole services portfolio with the stacked view

  • Identify which policy is assigned to a compute instance

  • Determine if change requests have been or need to be submitted

From the Cost Saving Opportunities page you perform the following actions:

  • Create, edit, and save CSO report settings

  • View report data in graphical or tabular form

  • Edit and save report filters

  • Edit and save Idle Resources and Right Sizing policies

  • Enable/disable or modify the change management settings in policies

  • Schedule CSO reports for emailing

Overview Dashboard

The Cost Saving dashboard offers a high-level view of your environment.

vp-cost-saving-dashboard.png

If your cloud environment is optimized and no right-sizing recommendations are available, then the Right Sizing card displays the word Optimized, with a green checkmark.

Tip

Right-sizing savings might differ from week to week because of different workloads on the selected entities.

Recommendation Details

Some things you can do using policies for idle resources and right sizing include the following:

  • Select the data sources to which the policy should apply.

  • Select a change management system for change requests, enable or disable the change request feature, and modify default settings for change requests.

  • Add or modify the optional constraints to guide the recommendation results and discover other use-case driven savings opportunities.

  • Preview the potential results of policy changes.

Idle Resources

The default Idle Resources report displays a list of all unattached resources, as well as resources attached to stopped cloud instances. The resources are sorted by monthly cost (highest to lowest). The report displays an image of the resources at the point in time the report was run.

The report can be sorted by any field. Click on the column header to sort by the field in ascending or descending order.

To view further details about any entity in the table, open the accordion for that entity.

vp-opt-cso-idle-resources.png

The Policy column in the Recommendation Details table contains a clickable badge vp-icon-policy.png that opens the configuration for the active policy. If no custom policies are created, the link opens the default policy. You can view or modify the policy settings.

The Change Request column indicates if a change request can be or has been submitted. If not yet submitted, a Change button displays. If the request has been submitted, the change request ID displays.

Using policies, you can add optional constraints to define idle resources and set thresholds. This allows you to fine-tune idle resource reporting. For example, you can identify only idle resources of higher cost, or avoid capturing resources that are idle by design

vp-opt-cso-ir-policy-default.png

Right Sizing

Each recommendation found in your Right Sizing report compares the attributes and utilization of an instance against the most currently available AWS or Azure SKU library. Cloud Cost Management (CCM) then determines what combination of CSP features would best suit your existing workload needs. You can set constraints for right sizing to ensure recommendations do not impact performance.

In the Recommendations table, rows highlighted in gray indicate one of the following.

  • No recommendations have been set.

    Cost and Savings columns in the Details table will display "--".

  • Recommendations have been calculated for those entities, but there are no savings recommendations (those entities are already optimized).

    Projected Savings columns in the Details table will display a value of "0".

  • Recommendations have been calculated for those entities, but the policy constraints do not allow the recommendations to be implemented.

    Cost and Savings columns in the Details table will display a monetary value in USD.

    If recommendations are inactive (grayed out), it is because some constraints assigned in the policy are not met for the indicated entities.

    For example, assume the right sizing policy constraint for Recommendation Aggressiveness is set to Propose only savings greater than 50%. In this case, the entities with savings less than 50% would be highlighted in gray and have no active recommendations.

On the Right Sizing tab you can easily compare week-to-week savings. If you click the date range above the Right Sizing table, you can see the Right Sizing Analysis Range. If you select a date range, Cloud Cost Management (CCM) recalculates the savings results for the selected period against the latest policy applied to the compute instance. If changes were made to the policy after the time when the report data was initially captured, those changes will be reflected in the recalculated output and might change the projected savings value.

Image of right-sizing recommendations table

Note

When viewing recommendations for Kubernetes, the Current Type and Proposed Type columns display recommended values, based on the Kubernetes configurations for CPU and memory. CPU and memory values are set in the configuration file, as shown in the Kubernetes documentation.

The following image show examples of Kubernetes recommended values, displayed as CPU-memory, such as 1000mCPU-128MiB. CPU values are in milli-CPUs.

vp-opt-cso-rs-k8s-recommend.png

Kubernetes metrics that are scraped by Prometheus are updated in CCM once a week.

Some additional constraints, that cannot be modified, are implemented by default on all right-sizing calculations. For example, right-sizing recommendations assume that the region configured by the user should not change, so recommendations will be kept within the existing assigned regions. Neither does right-sizing address preinstalled licensing, such as a pay-as-you-go Windows license, so license considerations are not included in recommendations.

You can see more detail about a specific compute instance by expanding the accordion in the table.

The Policy column in the Recommendation Details table contains a clickable badge vp-icon-policy.png that opens the configuration for the active policy. If no custom policies are created, the link opens the default policy. You can view or modify the policy settings.

vp-opt-cso-rightsizing-policy-parameters.png

The Change Request column indicates if a change request can be or has been submitted. If not yet submitted, a Change button displays. If the request has been submitted, the change request ID displays.

Related Topics

Idle Resources Reports

Idle Resources Policy Parameters

Right Sizing Reports

Right Sizing Policy Parameters