- [Instructor] Nobody likes surprises on their cloud bill.
Imagine opening your AWS invoice
and seeing charges far higher than you expected.
Perhaps a large EC2 instance was left
running over the weekend,
or a sudden spike in S3 storage usage increased your costs.
With proper monitoring in place,
you can identify these issues early and take action
before they become costly problems.
By keeping a close eye on your resource usage,
you can spot idle resources, overprovisioned instances,
and unusual spending patterns.
Early detection means you can rightsize, shut down
or reconfigure resources before they drive up your bill.
For example, if you notice an EC2 instance
with consistently low CPU utilization,
it might be a candidate for downsizing or even termination.
Let's look at the AWS tools
that can help you connect monitoring with cost savings.
We've seen that CloudWatch provides detailed metrics
to track performance.
You can also use CloudWatch
to identify cost saving opportunities.
Begin by tracking key metrics such as CPU,
memory and network utilization
for commonly used services like EC2 and RDS.
Then set alarms for when usage drops
and stays below specific thresholds.
For example, set an alarm
if CP utilization on an instance stays below 5%
for seven days.
This could indicate an underutilized resource
that can be downsized or shut down.
In the last video, we saw how Trusted Advisor can be used
for performance monitoring.
It also provides recommendations for cost optimization.
Some recommendations include overprovisioned EBS volumes,
idle load balancers, idle RDS DB instances,
and associated elastic IP addresses, inactive NAT gateways
and EC2 instances stopped for more than 30 days.
Trusted Advisor
has many more cost optimization recommendations.
You will find these in the documentation.
Now let's go to the AWS console
to explore additional cost optimization services.
The first service we're going to talk about is Cost Explorer.
You will find this under billing and cost management.
Once you're in the Cost Explorer console,
you will see your total cost and your average monthly cost.
Scrolling down, you'll see your costs
for the last few months.
Scrolling further, you will see a breakdown
of your usage by service.
As we can see in this account,
AWS config and EC2 instances contribute most to the cost.
Under report parameters,
there are several filters you can apply
including date range, dimension, service, and region.
If you have consistent tagging in your organization,
Cost Explorer can be very helpful as you can filter costs
by tags that represent projects, environments, departments,
and other relevant categories.
Back to the top,
you can also compare costs month over month
to see how your usage has changed.
The next service is Cost Anomaly Detection.
It identifies anomalous spending and its root causes.
Here are the anomalies detected in this environment,
along with their total cost impact
and the total spend compared to the previous month.
Scroll down to find the details of the anomalies,
their cost impact, and the root cause service.
To start using Cost Anomaly Detection,
you will need to create a monitor
where you define the services you want to analyze.
And lastly, let's discuss AWS Budgets.
It allows you to set budgets
and be alerted when your usage exceeds your thresholds.
Creating a budget is straightforward.
Use the monthly cost budget template,
provide a name and enter your budgeted amount.
Also, add the email addresses you would like to notify.
Once created,
you'll be notified when your actual spend reaches 85%
and 100% of the budget,
as well as when the forecasted spend
is expected to reach 100%.
So there you have it.
CloudWatch, Trusted Advisor, Cost Explorer,
Cost Anomaly Detection, and AWS Budgets empower you
to keep your costs in check.
By combining these tools,
you can effectively manage your AWS costs
while maintaining a lean and efficient environment.
Next up, we'll talk about security monitoring.