The conclusion of .conf2016 means one thing for the cloud team here at Splunk - time to prepare for AWS re:Invent. We're just a month away, so let me welcome you to the first post of a re:Invent preview series about how AWS agility + Splunk visibility = customer success.

This week's topic is a throwback to my presentation last year with Gary Mikula and Siddhartha Dadana of FINRA - talking about end-to-end visibility in a large-scale AWS environment - particularly with regard to cost management.

If you use AWS, you know the challenges with managing cost. Your developers spin up instances and forget to spin them down. You leverage on-demand instances when you should be using reserved instances - and vice-versa! Every month or quarter you do an AWS cost audit, identify unnecessary spend, and then modify your deployment to save money. The next month or quarter you do the exact same thing.

What was it that Einstein said…? 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.'

Using Splunk, there is a better way to manage your AWS costs. Here are 5 principles on how to do effective AWS cost-management:

  • Manage and monitor costs continually, not monthly or quarterly
  • Extend visibility to developers. Accountability will
  • Correlate cost with This let's you quickly identify when you've provisioned a more powerful instance than you need. One way to is to alert when CPU and memory are below a certain threshold.
  • Find an automated solution to guide you on when to use RIs vs. on-demand vs. another type of instance
  • Bonus: Leverage machine learning to proactively identify billing anomalies so you get ahead of issues immediately

If the above resonates, you'll love the billing module in the free Splunk App for AWS, and you'll love the enhancements we'll be announcing at re:Invent.

And, if you want to know more about how Splunk can help you in your AWS deployment, let's chat at re:Invent.

Thanks for reading.

Praveen.

Splunk Inc. published this content on 28 October 2016 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein.
Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 28 October 2016 23:11:02 UTC.

Original documenthttp://blogs.splunk.com/2016/10/28/countdown-to-aws-reinvent-looking-for-real-time-aws-cost-management/

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