Making AWS Performance and Cost Management Easy

The native AWS management console provides the ITOps team managing their AWS Instances the ability to see configuration and performance stats of those instances, but not without flaws.

With the AWS management console it is difficult to spot an instance which is stressed unless a specific alarm has been set up. What’s more, the data is presented in a way which is not very user friendly or intuitive, so reaching the information may not be easy. Or if, for instance, one needs to know which are the top resource consuming instances for any type of resource ( i.e.network bandwidth, CPU, RAM, etc.) that information can’t be reached without considerable effort. Additionally, information like how many instances are using a specific key name or security group is very difficult to ascertain within the AWS management console.

And what about cost? Cost isn’t just for accounts – sure, they can see my last Total bill, but they won’t know the actual, everyday things such as – is there any unused attached storage which is being paid for? Is the assigned instance is underutilized or strained which may call for adding another instance, or consolidating existing ones to save costs?

Now this all becomes readily available, by using ControlUp’s AWS EC2 cloud management. With its easy, intuitive UI ControlUp brings everything AT ONCE to center stage, so finally all the instances are visible in the same place, their performance metrics and cost metrics are displayed with a great level of granularity, all live and in real time. If resources are strained, they’re shown in flashing red. If any aspect of the cost shoots up, so will the red flags.

Adding an EC2 instance to ControlUp is as easy as adding a cloud connection from within the console, simply provide your AWS EC2 credentials (which can be read only) and within seconds the ControlUp console will populate with live performance and cost metrics.

Questions like – which instance is costing the most Right Now? Do I have any storage connected to an instance which isn’t being used? According to current usage, how much can be expected to pay at the end of the month? All these and many more become easy to answer, they’re all right there in front of you, and you don’t need to be a master of manipulating reports in order to get to them.

With ControlUp, you have the built in capability to search, group, sort ascending or descending – effortlessly reaching combinations of configuration and performance metrics across the board. You can easily see the combined cost for all your instances, the cost of the connected storage, the cost of attached snapshots and RIs – all in real time, which means you can make informed decisions based on weighing in both actual usage and actual cost. ControUp uses the collected information to display the projected monthly cost for any instance. It also sums those cost metrics per region in the AWS infrastructure, providing a broader picture of the total expense.

Want to see what it looks like? Click here to see a short video.



Bringing the AWS EC2 instances into Controlup has more advantages, such as the ability to tweak the thresholds of the cost metrics and performance metrics and set up triggers to get alerts when those resources become stressed or in case any cost exceeds the acceptable amounts. This makes controlling AWS costs much easier, and results in spending the budget wisely only where needed.

But wait, there’s more! How about the built in ability to manage the instances’ power states, and even more actions can be added by using scripts, added via the AWS PowerShell Module.

Last but not least, when using Windows based instances, you can utilize the ControlUp agent to get an even deeper understanding of the performance of your instances, with full in-guest visibility of the workloads in the form of per-process metrics, which in turn allows you to investigate any performance issues and troubleshoot bottlenecks, lags or drained resources more effectively and briskly.

Once you see all the AWS instances in your ControlUp console, it becomes simple to correlate the performance of your EC2s with their real time costs.