Visualize your Savings Plan recommendations

A visualization of your recommendation can be used as a quick double check, and also assist to demonstrate the savings and risks to other job functions.

We will use the Cost Explorer hourly granularity feature to visualize Savings Plan recommendations. You need to have this enabled to view hourly usage, and there are associated costs.

1. In the console go to the Billing Dashboard:

2. Click on Savings Plans:

3. Click on Recommendations, and select EC2 Instance, 1-year, All upfront and 7 days:

4. Scroll down and pick a specific instance type:

5. Scroll up and click Cost Explorer:

6. Click the time period Last 7 days in this example, then click 7D and click Apply:

7. Click the granularity Monthly in this example, and select Hourly:

8. Click the Service filter, select EC2-Instances (Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute) and click Apply filters:

9. Click Instance Type in the Group by menu:

10. Click on Stack and select Line:

11. Apply a filter on the region if you use multiple regions:

12. If you have multiple instance types for a single family, you can select them by using a filter and choosing a stack graph. This will show the total costs for that family in the required region.

13. Click More filters:

14. Click Purchase Option, select On Demand and click Apply:

15. Hover over the recommendation that matches the family you chose:

16. Cost Explorer gives $0.51 hourly usage of C5.large which is the only instance in the C5 family. Our recommended commitment was $0.30 per hour for C5 all upfront. Go to the pricing page: https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/

17. Select the correct parameters that match the recommendation and view the rates:

18. The savings is 41%. We were using $0.51, so multiplied by 1-41% (0.59) = $0.30.

We can see the recommendation is accurate and valid, and see the usage pattern associated with the recommendation.