New Feature: Custom Thresholds for Savings Opportunities

Cloudthread launched Custom Thresholds for Savings Opportunities, giving Admins the ability to change the thresholds being referenced to trigger Opportunities for each individual opportunity and for each account.

This feature allows teams to adjust how aggressive they want to be in generating savings opportunities. Often users want to be more conservative in waste reduction recommendations for Production accounts when there’s potential performance tradeoffs (e.g. rightsizing) and more aggressive for Development and Test accounts where performance tradeoffs aren’t as important.

For example: the RDS rightsizing Savings Opportunity is triggered by:

• CPU: Maximum percent CPU utilization
• Freeable Memory: Minimum percent freeable memory
• Lookback: Number of lookback days to analyze thresholds

Now an admin could make it so that for Production accounts the max CPU utilization or freeable memory thresholds that trigger this savings opportunity is very conservative and looks back over a period of 30 days while for Development accounts the thresholds could be set more aggressively and look back 7 days.

FAQ:

1. Are there thresholds for all Cloudthread generated Savings Opportunities?
   No, some opportunities are binary (e.g. Unused Elastic IPs) without thresholds to customize and therefore admins can choose whether the Opportunity is “Active” for individual accounts. For some opportunities (e.g. Idle NAT Gateway) the number of lookback days can be edited.
2. Can all users edit Thresholds?
   No, only Admins can edit Thresholds.
3. Can I edit thresholds for a specific account separate from the others?
   Yes, this is possible.
4. Can I edit thresholds for the native cloud provider provided Savings Opportunities (e.g. from AWS Compute Optimizer or GCP Recommender)?
   No, these opportunities come as-is from native recommendation engines and can’t be edited. This may change in the future. For Trusted Advisor recommendations where Cloudthread has recreated all the Savings Opportunities (given it’s a paid service from AWS) the thresholds can be edited.
5. When are the new thresholds used?
   The next time Cloudthread scans for savings opportunities in your environment, typically within a day.