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Idle Resources Reports

Idle Resources reports are accessed from the Cost Saving Opportunities page. Use these reports to keep track of your unused cloud resources. You can access reports for AWS and Azure cloud providers and for their various resource types (on-demand, reserved, etc.).

The report shows you a snapshot of the idle resources at the point in time the report was run. Reports are run daily at 11:00 UTC.

You can customize reports based on entity type, and you can set thresholds to define what is considered "idle" for resources in your environment. Once your reports are created and saved, you can email them to appropriate recipients.

In addition to any native tools that might collect idle time data on your CSP, Cloud Cost Management (CCM) also collects and stores idle resource information in a database. The CCM database provides idle time information if native tools, such as CloudTrail, are not enabled or not available.

Azure Reports

For Azure instances, Idle Resources reporting is available for disks, public IPs, application gateways, and load balancers. The report displays the following:

  • For disks: Resources that are unattached or attached to stopped VMs.

    Possible Idle Types: Unattached, On Stopped VM

  • For Public IP addresses: Network interfaces that have a static public IP associated but the IP is unattached, and network interfaces that don't have a public IP.

    Possible Idle Types: Static

  • Application Gateway: It is essential to verify that the Application Gateways are in an operational "running" state. Gateways in a "stopped" state do not provide any opportunity for cost reduction. Resources can be considered as idle if they satisfy any of the following criteria:

    • Metrics Check: Review the “Total Requests” metric over a one-week duration. If this metric remains at zero, it signifies that the gateway is idle.

    • Running state without backend services configured.

    • Running state without frontend IP configurations in place.

    • Running state without configured listeners.

    Possible Idle Types: Missing Backend Configuration, Missing Frontend Configuration, Missing Listeners.

  • Load balancer: Resources without rules set, don't have frontend IP, no backend service, and no health probes set. Note: There is no way to determine the running state of the load balancer.

    Possible Idle Types: Missing Load Balancing Rules, Missing Backend Config, Missing Frontend Config, Missing Health Probe Config

Azure idle resource data is provided by the CCM database only.

AWS Reports

For AWS instances, Idle Resources reporting is available for EBS resources, Elastic IP resources, and ELB resources. The report displays the following:

  • For EBS: Resources that are not attached to an EC2 instance and those that are attached to stopped EC2 instances.

    Possible Idle Types: Unattached, On Stopped EC2

  • Elastic IP: Resources that are not associated with any EC2 instance or are attached to stopped EC2 instances.

    Possible Idle Types: Unattached, On Stopped EC2

  • For ELB: Resources that do not have EC2 instances attached to them.

    Possible Idle Types: None (cell is blank in the idle resources table)

    The ELB report includes the following resources:

    • Application Load Balancer (ALB)

    • Network Load Balancer (NLB)

    • Classic Load Balancer (CLB)

Information about AWS resource idle time can be collected in AWS CloudTrail, as well as the CCM database. Idle time for AWS resources is determined first by checking CloudTrail data, if CloudTrail is enabled on AWS.

If CloudTrail data is unavailable or is incomplete for any of the resources, then CCM can check its database for information. CCM can then report on resources for which idle times are definitively known, as well as on resources with an estimated idle period. The policy option "Include when idle period is unknown" allows you to enable or disable the inclusion of the CCM-estimated idle resources in AWS report results.

Related Topics

Cost Saving Opportunities Page

Viewing Reports

Idle Resources Policy Parameters