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Cost Opportunities

Last updated: 10 January 2020

Last edited Jan 10, 2020

Cost opportunities (aka “optimisation opportunities”) are actionable changes you can make on an account to reduce the monthly cost of that account.

Cost opportunities represent potential “waste” across the account or billing family, and are quantified by forecasted monthly cost saving against each opportunity and totalled in your Cost Summary and Forecast dashboard (see image below).

A “fully optimised” account (i.e. 100% optimisation score) will have 0 cost opportunities.

How are cost opportunities calculated?

Each opportunity is measured against the cost of the resource the opportunity relates to, and is specific to the rule that generates the opportunity.

Notes:

  1. This information comes from AWS API, not the bill files.
  2. Certain resources may break more than 1 cost rule, but total cost savings for the Billing family / Account does not double count savings for a resource that breaks more than 1 cost rule.
    Example:
    Rule 1, Resource 1 => Failure Savings: $10
    Rule 2, Resource 1 => Failure, Savings: $50
    Total Savings: $50
  3. Known issue: forecast monthly cost savings handles upfront payments for reserved instances as a single monthly cost saving, which will not materialise as future monthly cost savings. We are expecting to update this methodology in a cost opportunity calculation algorithm version.

List of Cost Opportunities

A list of cost opportunities available for your account(s) can be access either by:

  1. Improve button on Cost Summary and Forecast dashboard
  2. In Most significant optimisations* section at the bottom of the Cost Summary and Forecast dashboard.

* note: most significant optimisation only shows a subset of the full list based on significance.

In either report, the cost opportunities are ranked by size and you can download the full list by clicking on Download as Report.

Each opportunity is specific to the Cost Rule it breaks. For each opportunity you have the option to:

  1. Resolve the optimisation opportunity and realise potential gains.
  2. Create a ticket for a team member to action the opportunity (depending on communication channels configured)
  3. Suppress the check.

For actions you can take on rules, also see:

  1. Send rule to
  2. Configure rule


I see a discrepancy between the forecasted monthly cost savings and the total sum of the Most significant optimisation. Why?

The forecasted monthly cost savings shows the sum of all potential cost savings across the billing family (the master account + all linked accounts within Cloud Conformity)

Most significant optimisations shows sum of potential cost savings for each rule across the billing family.

Reasons for the discrepancy:

  1. Rules with total cost savings less than $10 don’t show up in the Most significant optimisations
  2. One resource can report different potential cost savings for two different rules.
    For example, if an old generation EC2 instance is idle, we have two failures for it with two different cost savings
    1. Old-generation Instance: You will save $12/month if you upgrade to a new generation
    2. Idle Instance: You will save $45/month if you terminate it.
      For such a case, the forecasted monthly savings will display $45, but the sum of Most significant optimisations will be $57 because the same resource is counted twice

Therefore, the forecasted monthly savings is the accurate total savings one can gain if all failures are resolved.

Still need help? Login to Cloud Conformity and submit a ticket to our support team