Cost Optimization - Recommendations

Recommendations 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 highlights idle and underutilized resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances or EBS volumes, 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 provide estimates for cost savings associated with those recommended actions.

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 that both AWS_EC2 and AWS_EBS datasources are applied and actively collecting metrics. See EC2 and EBS in LogicMonitor documentation for details on these datasources.

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. EC2/EBS 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 Open AWS Console (or the AWS icon to the right of the recommendation) to access your AWS console directly from Recommendations. You may need to sign in to your AWS account to access the console from this window.

Recommendation Types

LogicMonitor supports the following recommendation types for Amazon EC2 and EBS resources.

• Idle EC2 instances – terminate Idle EC2 instances to prevent cost generated by their active state.
  • An EC2 instance is considered “idle” when, in the past 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.
• Underutilized EC2 instances – Underutilized EC2 instances can be changed to a smaller instance type to optimize usage.
  • An EC2 instance is considered “underutilized” when the maximum CPU Utilization is less than 40.00% for the past 14 days.
• Unattached EBS volumes – EBS volumes that are not attached to an EC2 instance can be deleted.
  • An EBS volume is considered “unattached” if it was not assigned to an EC2 instance during the last dashboard refresh.