Newvem analytics provides comprehensive visibility to your EC2 footprint with drill downs from a consolidated view to a detailed resource status report. Newvem continuously analyzes EC2 instance utilization patterns and provides a down-to-the-hour picture of your AWS EC2 consumption and usage. Use it for Free!

Newvem monitors cloud servers that are active, but found that their IO has been mostly idle for a considerable amount of time. This means that you are using oversized servers, which is not cost efficient. We suggest to consider resizing these servers (i.e. move your workload to smaller, lower cost servers to reduce your compute costs). Instead of starting a new instance and configuring it from scratch, one may be able to simply resize the existing instance by moving it to a more suitable hardware configuration.

In this case we will suggest the following:

• Scale down your computer instances – vertical scaling; move your workload to smaller servers. Instead of starting a new smaller instance and having to configure it from scratch, you may be able to simply resize the existing instance by asking AWS move its content to a better fit instance type.

• Auto-scaling – Auto Scaling allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using increases seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and decreases automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.

Identification

Our identification of the issue is based on the following data:

• Some of your servers’ IO has been mostly idle for a considerable amount of time.

Instructions

To scale down - Check out the EC2 Instance type options and do the following steps:

1. Stop the initial instance: ec2-stop-instances $instance_id
2. While the EBS boot instance is stopped, switch the instance type, for example to m1.small: ec2-modify-instance-attribute -instance-type m1.small $instance_id
3. Start the instance using its new type: ec2-start-instances $instance_id
4. Don’t foregt to terminate the initial instance:ec2-terminate-instances $instance_id

[Newvem analyzes your baseline disaster recovery (DR) status, and recommends AWS features and best practices to reach optimal availability, increase outage protection  and quick recovery. Learn More]

How to use Auto Scaling - If you are signed up for the Amazon EC2 service, you are automatically registered for Auto Scaling. You simply:

1. Download the Auto Scaling Command Line Tools and the Amazon CloudWatch Command Line Tools from Developer Tools.
2. Use the as-create-launch-config command to create a Launch Configuration for your Auto Scaling Group. A Launch Configuration captures the parameters necessary to launch new Amazon EC2 instances.
3. Use the as-create-auto-scaling-group command to create an Auto Scaling Group. An Auto Scaling Group is a collection of Amazon EC2 instances to which you want to apply certain scaling conditions.
4. Use the as-put-scaling-policy command to describe each scaling action you want to take. For example, you can create one Policy that adds Amazon EC2 instances, and another that removes them.
5. Use the mon-put-metric-alarm Amazon CloudWatch command to create an alarm for each condition under which you want to add or remove Amazon EC2 instances, and specify the Auto Scaling Policy that you want the alarm to execute when that condition is met. You can define alarms based on any metric that Amazon CloudWatch collects. Examples of metrics on which you can set conditions include average CPU utilization, network activity or disk utilization.
6. Auto Scaling tracks when your conditions have been met and automatically takes the corresponding scaling action on your behalf.

[Newvem analytics tracks and presents your daily EC2 cost transactions and forecasts your EC2 future spend based on your usage patterns. In analyzing EC2 usage patterns, Newvem also recommends how to improve (re-sizing) resource usage and alternative EC2 pricing plans, such as reserved EC2 instances. Use it for Free!]

Keywords: Amazon EC2 instances, aws oversize servers (IO), efficient cloud servers, amazon ec2, amazon cloudwatch, EC2 Instance type options, Amazon EC2 service