Analyzing the costs of the under-utilized compute resources under an account

Use the Explore page of the TrueSight Cloud Cost Control to analyze costs of your resources and to identify the expensive ones by custom dimensions such as CPU utilization, resource type, region, and so on. If you have organized your resources by applying tags, you can use tags as a dimension too. You can create ad-hoc reports and quickly customize them.

From the Explore page, you can easily identify resources with under-utilized or over-provisioned CPU. You can filter the list of resources based on your requirements and analyze their costs.

Scenario

Ana is a Cloud Manager in an IT organization. She tracks the monthly cloud costs and reviews and analyzes the cost reports to keep the cloud costs in check. She also plans for the cloud budget to ensure that the current and future requirements are met.

Current problem: Ana needs to plan for the cloud budgets to provision resources for upcoming business needs for the HR department. The current resource requirements of the department are managed under the account name HR. To budget accurately, she wants to create a report with a list of all the under-utilized compute resources that the department uses that can be reclaimed or released, and their corresponding costs. She wants to save this report for offline access and share it with other stakeholders to show the resulting cost savings.

Solution: With the Explore page of the TrueSight Cloud Cost Control, Ana can quickly view the resources with under-utilized CPU. The Summarized fields on the page provide the total cost value of these resources. Also, she can easily export the details to a PDF or a spreadsheet. For details, see the following sections:

Prerequisites
Steps to analyze the costs of under-utilized compute resources under the HR account

Prerequisites

Ensure that the administrator has already completed the following prerequisite tasks:

Install TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
Configure data collection to import the public cloud and on-premises infrastructure data. For more information, see Collecting-data.
Authorize Ana to access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.

Steps to analyze the costs of under-utilized compute resources under the HR account

Ana performs the steps as given in the following order:

Step 1: Access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
Step 2: Display the CPU utilization values for all resources in the table
Step 3: Display all the resources that are used by the HR department under the account name - HR
Step 4: (Optional) Sort the table to show the resources with lowest to highest CPU utilization
Step 5: Display the resources that are under-utilized
Step 6: Save an offline copy of the final results as a report.

Step 1: Access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.

1. Log on to the TrueSight console to access TrueSight Cloud Cost Control.
2. Click the Explore tab. The Explore page opens that displays all the available resources under all the cloud providers.

Step 2: Display the CPU utilization values for all resources in the table

1. Click Edit. The Edit window opens.
2. In the Displayed columns section, click Select columns.
3. In the Edit Columns window, click Metrics and select CPU Util.
4. Click Done and then, click Apply.
5. The table displays all resources with their corresponding CPU utilization values under a new column - CPU Util.

Step 3: Display all the resources that are used by the HR department under the account name - HR

In the table, under the Account name column, look for and click HR.

The table is filtered and only shows all resources under the HR account. You can see the total cost of the resources by reviewing the Total Cost summarized field.

Step 4: (Optional) Sort the table to show the resources with lowest to highest CPU utilization

Step 5: Display the resources that are under-utilized

1. Click Filter. The Filter window opens.
2. Click CPU Util and provide the condition: CPU Util < 20%.
3. Click Done and then click Apply.
  The table is further filtered to display the resources under the HR account and those using less than 20% CPU.

Step 6: Save an offline copy of the final results as a report.

Click Settings Settings icons.png and select Export to PDF or Export to Excel.

Ana can use the offline report and discuss it with the Cloud Architect, Sam, to take the necessary action. They evaluate the cost benefits and decide to reclaim these resources after moving all the services and applications that are running on these resources to another resource.