Understanding your reservations with Cost Explorer
Balancing your Reserved Instance (RI) usage and your On-Demand Instance usage can help you achieve better efficiency. To help, Cost Explorer provides tools that help you understand where your greatest RI costs are and how you can potentially lower your costs. Cost Explorer provides you with an overview of your current reservations, shows your RI utilization and coverage, and calculates recommended Reserved Instances (RIs) that could save you money if you purchase them.
Using your RI reports
You can use the RI reports page in the Cost Explorer console to see how many reservations you have, how much your reservations are saving you compared to similar usage of On-Demand Instances, and how many of your reservations are expiring this month.
Cost Explorer breaks down your reservations and savings by service and lists your potential savings: that is, the costs of On-Demand usage compared to what that usage could cost you with an RI.
To use your potential savings, see Accessing Reserved Instance Recommendations.
Managing your reservation expiration alerts
You can track your reservations and when your reservations expire in Cost Explorer. With reservation expiration alerts, you can receive email alerts 7, 30, or 60 days in advance before your reservation expires. These alerts can be sent to up to 10 email recipients. You can also choose to be notified on the day that your reservation expires. Reservation expiration alerts are supported for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service reservations.
To turn on reservation expiration alerts
Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home
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Navigate to the Overview page under the Reservations section.
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Choose Manage alert subscriptions in the upper right corner.
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Select the check boxes for when you want to receive your alerts.
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Enter email addresses for who you want to notify. You can have up to 10 email recipients.
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Choose Save.
AWS starts monitoring your reservation portfolio and sends alerts based on the preferences that you specify.