Azure Reserved Instance Recommendations Report

The Azure Reserved Instance (RI) Recommendations report uses information from Azure 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 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: Select your Azure Cloud Account. If this dropdown is not populated, you need to add an Azure account.

Region: The regions available will be the ones associated with the cloud account you selected.

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

Scope: Select Single if you want RIs to apply only to VMs inside of a specific Azure subscription. Select Shared if you want RIs to apply to any VM inside of any subscription within a single Azure tenant.

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.

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.

Understanding the report

The 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.

Recurring Monthly Cost: The cost per month.

Flexibility Group: Within this flexibility group, the discount for a purchased RI can be applied to other VMs of various sizes.

Flexibility Ratio: A relative comparison between each VM size and the VM size purchased in the RI's flexibility group. You can use this ratio to calculate how the RI discount applies to the VMs you have running.

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