Power on-off recommendations for VMs

Use the Schedule Power-Off VMs recommendation to determine the VMs that display a regular usage pattern with a significant idle time. For the identified VMs, you can view the recommendations that suggest actions to power-off these VMs during their idle time and power-on them back during their functional time to achieve cost savings. 

By default, the recommendations are displayed on the Dashboard with a summary of the total VMs that can be scheduled to power-off in your infrastructure and the estimated saving you can achieve by acting on the recommendation. For detailed recommendations per VM, click the <Number> Power On Off VMs. The Recommendations page opens and the VMs list is displayed in the Schedule Power-Off VMs tab.  

The page provides a quick overview of the number of VMs that are idle for a specific time and the estimated savings that you can achieve per month by scheduling power off. 

From this page, you can achieve the following goals:

• Determine the days of the month and the amount of time the VMs are idle in your infrastructure.
• Determine the period for which the VMs can be powered-off during their idle time to ensure cost savings.
• Determine the total estimated savings that you can achieve by scheduling power-off of the VMs.

To analyze the idle time of the VMs in your infrastructure

1. In the navigation bar of BMC Helix Cloud Cost, select Recommendations. 
   The table on the page lists all the idle VMs and their details, such as estimated savings that you can achieve by scheduling power-off of the VM, recommended time frame for which the VM can be powered off, instance type, and account name information. 
   
   
   Business services that are imported as resource pools are marked with Business Service and Imported labels in the resource pools list. Cross-launch links are available from the Recommendations page for the resources that belong to these imported resource pools. These links can be used to launch BMC Helix Discovery to see the Application model details.

2. Click the VM name. 
   The Resource Details page opens. 

3. This page shows information about the VM, such as the recommended days of the month and the duration of time the VM must be powered off, the estimated savings you can achieve by implementing the recommendation, and other details.  The graph displays the CPU usage in percentage for the last 30 days. 
   
   Every recommendation has an Efficiency icon associated with it. The icon indicates the level of efficiency improvement. It is based on the estimated savings (in $) per month that you can achieve by implementing the recommended actions. One of the following icons is displayed:

   •  - Cost saving is greater than $50

   •  - Cost saving is less than $50 but greater than $25

   •  - Cost saving is less than $25

4. Your cloud planner can take appropriate actions on VMs by reviewing the suggested recommendations. The cloud planner can decide to ignore the recommendations or act on the recommendations.
   Based on the action performed on the VMs, they are displayed under the Recommended or Ignored tabs.

You can save an offline copy of the page in a CSV file for reference. To do so, click Export All to CSV. When you export to the CSV file, the recommendation details for all the virtual machines on the page are also exported. You can use this file as quick reference and perform the suggested actions.

The following details are displayed in the CSV file: type, severity, uptime, update_ts, busy_pattern, idle_pattern, instance_type, textual_pattern, pattern_end_date, monthly_off_hours, reliability_index, monthly_avg_errors, pattern_start_date, finding, optimal, ref_timestamp, resource_id, provider_id, category, account_id, account_name, name, service_id, region, aws:createdBy, Name, master_account_id, service_name, rule_id, short_finding, cost_saving, cost_saving_currency, Owner, aws:autoscaling:groupName, cost-bearer, cost-percentage, and cost-ratio.