Cost Optimization - Recommendations
Last updated on 28 October, 2024Recommendations Overview
Recommendations allow you to reduce costs and optimize your cloud infrastructure by suggesting changes to monitored cloud resources. Using the data LogicMonitor collects, Recommendations can suggest compute and storage specifications to match your performance and capacity needs at the lowest possible cost.
Recommendations highlight idle and underutilized AWS and Azure resources in your environment. It then recommends actions based on your workload, such as terminating or scaling instances, to right-size your resources. It can also estimate cost savings associated with those recommended actions.
Note: The dashboard provides utilization and cost suggestions for the following resources:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
- Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)
Support for Azure VMs is currently in beta. Functionality may be limited while support for these resources is established.
Setting up Recommendations
To access Recommendations, you must enable the tool in your LogicMonitor dashboard. Go to Settings > Users and Roles and select Recommendations in the permissions list. See Roles in LogicMonitor documentation for information on creating new roles.
Note: Recommendations are enabled by default for administrators following feature flag activation.
Ensure the following datasources are applied and actively collecting metrics:
- AWS_EC2 version 1.6.0+
- AWS_EC2_EBS version 1.4.0+
- AWS_EBS any version
- Microsoft_Azure_VMs version 2.7.0+
For more information on setting up datasources, see Module Installation.
Navigating Recommendations
Select Recommendations in the navigation sidebar to view your current recommendations. Use Filter by to filter recommendations by region, provider, account, and resource type. Select the plus icon to choose a filter property, and enter any details to refine the selected filter. Widgets and recommendations will update automatically to reflect the selected filters.
Widgets provide an overview of the following recommendations.
- Annual potential savings opportunity – Displays an estimate (in USD) of the annual cost savings associated with all current recommendations.
- Savings opportunities by active recommendation type – Displays a circle graph of active recommendation types and their associated savings estimate. Hover over each section to see the recommendation type and savings.
- Top 5 largest savings opportunities by resource – Displays a bar graph of the 5 recommendations with the most impact on overall savings. Hover over a bar to see the resource associated with each recommendation.
- Savings opportunities by account – Displays a circle graph of individual AWS accounts and their associated savings estimate. Hover over each section to see the account ID and savings.
Toggle Hide top widgets off to hide recommendation widgets.
Below the widgets you can see specific recommended actions and associated savings estimates. Choose either “Recommendation Type” or “Resource” in the View By filter to see available recommendations based on either option. A time stamp details when the next update starts.
Each line displays estimated savings, associated resource(s) and status, and recommended actions. Select any line to expand the recommendation. This displays a table with details of individual resources and all relevant details. Here you can pinpoint a resource and its specifications (eg. Instance/VM type, CPU usage, capacity, etc.) as well as the associated account ID and availability zone.
The table also displays savings estimates for each resource, the date and time of the last status detected, and any recommended actions for the resource to reduce cost. Selecting a resource name in the list opens a new tab to the Resources dashboard in LogicMonitor.
Select Console or the logo icon next to a recommendation to access your AWS or Azure console directly from Recommendations. You may need to sign in to your provider account to access the console from this window.
Recommendation Types
LogicMonitor supports the following recommendation types:
- Idle EC2 instances/Azure VMs—Terminate Idle resources to prevent cost generated by their active state.
- An EC2 instance is considered “idle” when, in 7 days, the average CPU Utilization is less than 5.00%, network throughput is less than 100MB, and the maximum combined network transfer rate is less than 2.00Mbps.
- An Azure VM is considered “idle” when, in 7 days, the average CPU Utilization is less than 5.00%, network throughput is less than 200MB, and the maximum combined network transfer rate is less than 2.00Mbps.
- Underutilized EC2 instances/Azure VMs—Underutilized instances or VMs can be changed to a smaller type to optimize usage. Changing instances/VMs is region-specific.
- An instance or VM is considered “underutilized” when the maximum CPU Utilization is less than 40.00% for the past 14 days.
- Unattached EBS volumes—Storage that is not attached to an instance can be deleted.
- Storage is considered “unattached” if it was not assigned to an instance during the last dashboard refresh.
Note: Recommendations provided by this tool are intended as general cost optimization opportunities. Cost savings are estimates only, and actions suggested by Recommendations may not be the best solution for certain environments. Always review the details of your cloud resources before making changes to minimize impact to your environment’s performance.