Feature Friday: Savings Opportunities

Savings opportunities are checks that are run against cloud accounts managed by Kion. Read on to find out how how decommissioning and rightsizing opportunities can help you optimize your spend in the cloud.

Using Decommissioning Opportunities

Decommissioning opportunities are resources Kion believes you can eliminate.

1. To view a list of decommissioning opportunities, select Savings Opportunities from the left navigation.
2. Select Decommissioning Opportunities to see all opportunities. Click on an opportunity to learn more.
3. Click on the ellipsis menu and select View details.

In the example in our video, Kion has identified a load balancer that doesn't actually have any instances behind it, so it's not actually going to service anything and, therefore, it's wasting money.

From the details screen, you can select Terminate resource from the Actions menu to terminate the resource directly if you have the proper access. No need to federate into the cloud.

You can also mark this opportunity as applied if you want to manually take action. By marking it as applied, the opportunity will disappear until you run the check again, which will be on the next day.

Alternatively, you can dismiss the opportunity if this is actually correct for your environment.

Using Rightsizing Opportunities

Rightsizing opportunities are resources that can be tweaked to save you some money. These opportunities are slightly different because, instead of getting rid of the resource, this finding indicates where you can scale the resource down in order to save money.

1. To view a list of rightsizing opportunities, select Savings Opportunities from the left navigation.
2. Select Rightsizing Opportunities to see all opportunities. Click on an opportunity to learn more.
3. Click on the ellipsis menu and select View details.

In the example in our video, we can see that this is an RDS instance that's really not using a lot of CPU and, therefore, that's why we identified it as an opportunity.

Within the Actions menu you can go in and mark this as applied or dismissed.

To resize the resource, you would go into the cloud account and take those resource actions appropriately. Note that this action will likely cause downtime in your environment, so you want to make a plan in advance of taking this action.

Viewing Project-Specific Opportunities

The global savings opportunity view allows you to see all opportunities within Kion. As a project stakeholder, however, you may only be interested in your individual project.

1. To view opportunities at a project level, select All Projects from the Projects menu in the left navigation.
2. Select your project, and then select Savings Opportunities to see opportunities for just your project.

You have the same ability to view details and to take action on an opportunity in this project view.

If you'd like to see a demo of Kion's financial management features, as well as our other features such as account provisioning and continuous compliance, please request a demo.

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