Identify any Amazon EC2 instances that appear to be overutilized and upgrade (resize) them in order to help your EC2-hosted applications to handle better the workload and improve the response time. By default, an EC2 instance is considered "overutilized" when matches the following criteria:
The daily average CPU utilization has been more than 90% for the last 7 days.
Note: You can change the default threshold values for this rule on the Cloud Conformity console and set your own values for the CPU (percent). The console also provides information about each EC2 instance marked as overutilized, details such as region, ID, instance type, launch time and operating system to help you perform the EC2 right-sizing analysis.
This rule resolution is part of the Cloud Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS
efficiency
Overutilized instances could indicate that the applications running on these machines do not have enough hardware resources to perform optimally. Upgrading (upsizing) overutilized EC2 instances (vertical scaling) or adding more instances to your Auto Scaling Groups (horizontal scaling) to meet the load needs will improve directly the health and success of your applications, resulting in a more stable environment and a faster response time.
Audit
To identify any overutilized EC2 instances that could benefit from a more efficient hardware configuration, perform the following:
Remediation / Resolution
Case A: Upgrade (upsize) the overused EC2 instances provisioned within your AWS account by adding more hardware resources (CPU) to the existing instances (vertical scaling). To resize an overutilized EC2 instance, perform the following commands:
(!) Important note: the following process assumes that the EC2 instances selected for upgrade are NOT currently used in production or for critical operations. To resize production instances without any downtime, you should create a snapshot of your current image and launch a new instance from that snapshot using the required instance type.Case B: Increase the capacity of the Auto Scaling Group (ASG) consisting of overused EC2 instances by adding more machines (instances) to the existing group (horizontal scaling). To upgrade an overutilized AWS Auto Scaling Group, perform the following commands:
References
- AWS Documentation
- Trusted Advisor Best Practices (Checks)
- Monitoring Memory and Disk Metrics for Amazon EC2 Linux Instances
- Amazon EC2 Metrics and Dimensions
- Stop and Start Your Instance
- Amazon EC2 Instance Types
- Auto Scaling Groups
- Scaling the Size of Your Auto Scaling Group
- Manual Scaling
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- ec2
- describe-instances
- stop-instances
- modify-instance-attribute
- start-instances
- cloudwatch
- get-metric-statistics¶
- autoscaling
- update-auto-scaling-group
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You are auditing:
Overutilized AWS EC2 Instances
Risk level: High