Track your Reserved Instance (RI) Utilization in AWS Cost Explorer

Posted on: Dec 14, 2016

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. This is done via an intuitive interface that enables you to quickly create custom reports (including charts and tabular data) that analyze cost and usage data, both at a high level (e.g., total costs and usage across all accounts) and for highly-specific requests (e.g., m2.2xlarge costs within account Y that are tagged “project: secretProject”).

Today, we added Reserved Instance (RI) Utilization Reports to Cost Explorer, in order to help you better understand and manage your RI costs and usage. These reports illustrate—for all RIs purchased—the utilization (i.e., the percentage of purchased RI hours that were used by matching instances) purchasing account, instance type, and additional reservation-related information within the user-defined time period. These reports also allow you to define a utilization threshold and identify RIs that are tracking above and below that threshold.

Learn more about the RI utilization report in Cost Explorer.