AWS Reserved Instance Recommendations Report

The AWS Reserved Instance (RI) Recommendations report uses information from the AWS Reserved Instance Utilization Report and the AWS Reserved Instance Coverage Report to recommend reservation purchases to maximize your cost savings.

Based on your instance uptime, the report recommends RI purchases for your selected requirements and shows you the projected savings for each purchase.

This report, which shows only AWS reservations for EC2 Compute Instances, replaces the Reserved Instance Planner report in version 8.5. If you had a scheduled task to email the Reserved Instance Planner report to you, that task will be removed in version 8.5, so you'll no longer receive Reserved Instance Planner report emails. You can configure the AWS Reserved Instance Recommendations report to send emails, but running this report incurs AWS charges. For more information, see Generate and Schedule Reports.

To retrieve Reserved Instance Recommendations information from Amazon, you must enable Amazon's Cost Explorer. For more information, see Set up your AWS account with Amazon Cost Explorer.

There's a fee of $0.01 USD per request to AWS to retrieve recommendation data. Generally, only one request is required per consolidated billing account. For cloud accounts with many resources, multiple requests may be required. These request fees will be visible on the Cost Dashboard.

Data for this report is retrieved directly from AWS, so the data is more accurate and has up-to-date estimated costs. With this new method of retrieving data directly, you don't need to retrieve data hourly — you can use daily billing retrieval. Switching from an hourly to a daily billing retrieval configuration may result in a significant performance improvement for billing retrieval.

If you change the AWS billing retrieval configuration from hourly to daily, you must configure a new AWS Cost and Usage Report. It's recommended that you build up a data history of two calendar months before you switch from hourly to daily. For more information see Create an AWS billing report.

This report doesn't support any markup or discount cost adjustments you've made to the cost model and isn't available for Service Portal users.

You can select the currency for your report. All costs shown in the report will be converted to this currency.

Planning your Reserved Instance purchases

Before purchasing any RIs, you can apply rightsizing recommendations and power schedule recommendations to ensure that you'll be purchasing the correct size and quantity of RIs. For more information, see Manage Recommendations.

To purchase RIs, we recommend the following:

1. Run the Reserved Instance Recommendations Report a few days before the end of the month.
2. Discuss the report's recommendations with the owners of the target instances to ensure that each RI is a good fit.
3. Purchase the recommended RI(s) on the first day of the month to ensure that your RIs will always expire at the end of a month.

For more information on other cloud expense management features that are available to reduce your cloud bill, see Cloud Expense Management.

Report settings

Looking Back: Select the time period of past usage to include in the recommendation calculations.

Cloud Account: You can select your AWS payer account, individual linked accounts, or a GovCloud account. When you select a payer account, you have the option to retrieve data for its linked accounts using the Linked Accounts setting described below. If you select a linked account that doesn't have direct access to Amazon's Cost Explorer, the associated payer account's access will be used. If you select a linked account, only data for that account will be shown in the report.

Region: The regions available will be the ones associated with the cloud account you selected. When you select a specific region, and are retrieving data for a payer account with the Include Linked Accounts option selected, then all accounts within that region are shown, even if they aren't managed by Commander. When you select All, with the Include Linked Accounts option selected, a superset of pre-configured regions is used. This superset includes selected regions for the payer account and all the linked accounts found in Commander.

Linked Accounts: You can select None to view data from only the cloud account you selected above. Select Include Linked Accounts to see data from the payer account and the linked accounts associated with the payer account, including any GovCloud accounts, even if the linked accounts aren't managed by Commander.

After you click Generate, you can cancel the generation of this report before it completes by right-clicking on the generation task line in the Task window and selecting Cancel.

Payment Option:

• All Upfront: Pay for the entire reservation term in one upfront payment. Offers the highest savings rate.
• Partial Upfront: Pay for part of the reservation term in an upfront payment, then pay the remainder in monthly installments. Costs more than All Upfront, but less than No Upfront.
• No Upfront: Pay for the reservation in monthly installments throughout the term's duration. Offers the lowest savings rate.

RI Term: Select a one-year or a three-year term for RIs.

Offering Class: Select standard or convertible RIs.

Limit Spending To: The currency for this value must be USD, however the report will display costs in the currency you select in the Report Generator. When you enter a value in this field, the report will cap the spending at the specified limit. This option is useful if you already know the amount you can spend on RIs. An empty field means that there's no spending limit, and all purchases are included in the report, regardless of cost.

Required Savings %: Enter the lowest percent that you want to save with RI purchases. For example, if you want to see reservation recommendations that save you at least 20% of the cost of on-demand options, enter 20. An empty field means there's no required saving limit.

Currency: Select the currency for the report. All costs shown in the report will be converted to this currency.

Understanding the report

The AWS Reserved Instance Recommendations report provides a summary of the savings over on-demand costs if the recommendations are followed.

Estimated Annual Savings: The available yearly savings compared to the cost of on-demand pricing.

Savings vs On-Demand (%): The percent savings over on-demand costs if the recommendations are followed.

Purchase Recommendations: The number of recommendations included in this report.

This report can be exported to both CSV and PDF formats.