- Isaiah Rendorio and Mike Polson
- October 1, 2020
We are excited to announce the integration of Apptio's cloud cost management platform with the observability platform provider New Relic. This integration enables Cloudability customers to leverage New Relic as their preferred utilization data provider, resulting in improved rightsizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 and Azure Compute resources. With superior recommendations, organizations can rightsize with confidence, eliminating waste, and improving overall cloud efficiency.
By default, the rightsizing engine obtains virtual machine performance metrics from native cloud monitoring services such as Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor. This platform-level data consists of CPU, network, disk, and, if available, memory metrics. By analyzing these metrics, Cloudability produces recommendations for alternative instance sizes that better fit the observed workload and reduce that resource’s overall cost.
When evaluating alternative instances, there are many metrics taken into consideration, with memory being one of the primary criteria. Since native cloud monitoring services report only basic utilization metrics – such as CPU, network, and disk utilization – crucial information related to memory consumption remains largely unavailable. Without the context offered by memory metrics, our recommendations are limited to instances that retain at least the same memory, thereby reducing the target options and potential savings available.
Why memory metrics
Memory utilization is a guest OS-level metric that requires an agent to be installed locally on each resource for this information to be captured. While both cloud vendors provide native metrics agents, the installation process can be complicated and often face concerns from an organization’s security teams. Our analysis shows that over 90% of all virtual machines do not report this information via the native tools.
Since customers have already installed the New Relic infrastructure agent on their virtual machines, they immediately benefit from the availability of memory metrics. Furthermore, third-party monitoring solutions like New Relic sample metrics more frequently than the native tools – and are, therefore, more likely to capture peak events. Engineers can take recommended actions with confidence. By pulling historical memory consumption from New Relic, Cloudability can recommend a greater range of cost-saving instance types, resulting in up to an additional 15% savings opportunities on top of existing opportunities.
Better together
With this integration, Apptio customers can now choose New Relic as their preferred source for utilization data. Customers benefit from this integration by using a familiar tool that provides utilization data to inform rightsizing recommendations.
Start rightsizing with confidence
Setup is easy, supply the account and insights query API key for each New Relic account. Then each day, we will produce rightsizing recommendations powered by New Relic utilization data. Below is the New Relic Credentialing screen. For each New Relic account, you will need to provide an account ID and insights query key.
Ready to get started? Find out how.
