Power On/Off VM recommendation

The Power On/Off recommendation identifies 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. A VM is detected to be idle if the VM is idle in a pattern in the last 90 days; for a minimum of 7 days.

The Power On/Off recommendations are available for VMs in your GCP infrastructure.

The following recommendation details are provided:

• Recommended action that suggests scheduling the VM instance to turn off in the specified period
• Duration and time for which the VM was idle

You can analyze these recommendation details and decide the action to be taken on the VM. For example, you can decide to power-off of the VM in the following scenarios:

• The VM is idle on working days; from the beginning of day to 8 AM and from 6 PM to the end of the day
• The VM is idle over the weekends

Depending on the scenario, you might decide to keep the VM in the on or off state. 

The recommendation rule is based on the following indicator thresholds. 

• CPU utilization = 5 %
• Disk I/O rate = 100 Kbytes/s
• Network rate = 200 Kbytes/s

You can change the default values of these thresholds on the Thresholds page in the Helix Capacity Optimization Console. 

For more information about configuring thresholds, see Configuring and managing thresholds for metrics and indicators.

The Optimizer rule identifies a VM as idle if the VM is idle for more than 95% of the time when the VM was powered on during the analysis period. If you want the Optimizer rule to detect the VM as idle during the entire analysis period, you can change the idle VM powered on time value to 100 percent on the Rules page in the Helix Capacity Optimization Console. 

For more information about modifying the Optimizer rules, see Configuring and managing Optimizer rules.