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With LogicMonitor, you can monitor your AWS or Azure spend and identify ways to optimize your monthly bill. First, make sure you have enabled billing monitoring for your AWS or Azure account and imported the billing DataSources into your account. As a part of this, we highly recommend that you set up the AWS and Azure Cost By Tag DataSources with Active Discovery, such that tag values are auto-discovered and spend is tracked for each (instructions on linked pages above). Once you’ve done this, we recommend the following:
By default, LogicMonitor’s AWS and Azure Billing datasources don’t have any alert thresholds set because costs vary so much from case to case. You can set thresholds for services and regions that enable you to identify when you’re close to exceeding your budget or your average monthly cost. This will result in alerts that can be sent in a daily report or individually to your finance team, or even to the engineers that are provisioning and running services in the cloud.
Setting thresholds for your spend data can provide value for managing your monthly bill, but it can be equally as valuable to set up dashboards that paint a picture of how your costs are trending. You can add widgets to show:
Consider adding widgets to the dashboard you created in 2, or creating a new dashboard dedicated to identifying unused and over-utilized resources. You can use virtual datapoints in your top ten graphs to display your least utilized resources (i.e. bottom ten). For example, you could add a virtual datapoint with the expression “100 – CPU Utilization” to get the CPU Idle percent for your EC2 instances. You may want to create a dashboard with the following bottom ten graphs:
Over-provisioned resources are probably not something you’ll want to receive alert notifications for, but identifying them can help you minimize your monthly AWS bill. To see how our engineers used LogicMonitor dashboards to identify our own under-utilized AWS resources, see this blog post.
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