Moving to the cloud is one of the best decisions you can make for your business. The low startup costs, instant elasticity, and near endless scalability have lured many organizations from traditional datacenters to the cloud. Although cloud startup costs are extremely low, over time the burgeoning use of resources within an AWS account can slowly increase the cost of operating in the cloud.
One service AWS provides to help with watching the costs of an AWS environment is AWS Trusted Advisor. AWS touts the service as “your customized cloud expert” that helps you monitor resources according to best practices. Trusted Advisor is a service that runs in the background of your AWS account and gathers information regarding cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, and performance. Trusted Advisor can be accessed proactively through the support console or can be setup to notify you via weekly email.
The types of Trusted Advisor notifications available for Cost Optimization are Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Optimization, Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances, Idle Load Balancers, Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes, Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses, and RDS Idle DB Instances. Within these service types, Trusted Advisor gives you four types of possible statuses; “No problems detected,” “Investigation recommended,” “Action recommended,” and “Not available.” Each one of these status types give insight to how effectively you are running your account based on the best-practice algorithm the service uses. In the below example, AWS Trusted Advisor points out $1,892 of potential savings for this account.
Each one of these notifications adds up to the total potential monthly savings. Here is one “Investigation recommended” notification from the same account. It says “3 of 4 DB instances appear to be Idle. Monthly savings of up to $101 are available by minimizing idle DB Instances.”
Clicking the drop down button reveals more:
The full display tells you exactly what resource in your account is causing the alert and even gives you the estimated monthly savings if you were to make changes to the resource. In this case the three RDS instances are running in Oregon and Ireland. This particular service is basing the alert on the “Days since last connection,” which is extremely helpful because if there have been no connections to the database in 14+ days, there’s a good chance it’s not even being used. One of the best things about Trusted Advisor is that it gives the overview broken down by service type and gives just enough information to be simple and useful. We didn’t have to login to RDS and navigate to the Oregon region or the Ireland region to find this information. It was all gathered by Trusteed Advisor and presented in an easy to read format. Remember, not all of the information provided may need immediate attention, but it’s nice to have it readily available. Another great feature is each notification can be downloaded as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that allows you to have even more control over the data the service provides.
Armed with the Trusted Advisor tool you can keep a closer eye on your AWS resources and gain insight to optimizing costs on a regular basis. The Trusted Advisor covers the major AWS services but is only available to accounts with Business or Enterprise-level support. Overall, it’s a very useful service for watching account costs and keeping an eye on possible red flags on an account. It definitely doesn’t take the place of diligent implementation and monitoring of resources by a cloud engineer but can help with the process.
– Derek Baltazar, Senior Cloud Engineer
