Manage unused resources
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Summary of Manage unused resources
The Manage unused resources feature helps ServiceNow customers reduce cloud costs by identifying resources that are not being used and scheduling jobs to power off or terminate them. This process automates cost savings by analyzing usage and spend data to generate actionable recommendations across various cloud providers and service categories.
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Key Features
- Recommendations and Analysis: Resources identified as unused are recommended for termination or power-off based on detailed analysis. For Microsoft Azure, recommendations come from Azure Advisor; for AWS, Azure, and GCP, recommendations may also be custom-generated by ServiceNow.
- Actionable Tabs: Resources are categorized into tabs such as New, Scheduled, Declined, Completed, Failed, and Excluded, each representing different states of the unused resources lifecycle and enabling targeted management.
- Configuration and Scheduling: Customers can configure unused resource operations, set thresholds for potential savings to trigger notifications, and schedule jobs to power off or terminate resources automatically.
- Resource Management: Ability to add resources to jobs, move them between scheduled jobs, or exclude specific resources from analysis while continuing to collect cost and usage data.
- Detailed Reporting: Visual charts display total potential savings by service category (e.g., Compute, Database, Storage) and by change group (e.g., Change Management, Application Development), helping prioritize cost optimization efforts.
Key Details and Practical Use
- Potential Savings: Monthly savings estimates are provided per resource if resized or terminated as recommended, helping customers quantify financial impact.
- Confidence Levels: Recommendations include confidence levels based on data availability and similarity between current and suggested resource types, aiding decision-making.
- Resource Metadata: Information such as provider, service category, cloud service, region, owner, and change group is provided for each resource, improving context and management.
- Job Execution: Each successful billing download triggers multiple jobs including Unused resources analysis, ensuring up-to-date recommendations.
- Exclusion Management: Resources can be excluded from unused resource recommendations to prevent unintended termination or power-off, while still tracking their cost and usage data.
Outcomes for ServiceNow Customers
By leveraging this feature, customers can systematically identify and manage idle or underutilized cloud resources, leading to significant cost savings. Scheduling automated termination or power-off jobs reduces manual intervention and risk of overspending. Detailed reporting and configuration capabilities enable precise control and visibility into cloud cost optimization efforts, aligned with organizational priorities and workflows.
Reduce cost by identifying the unused resources and scheduling jobs to power-off or terminate the unused resources.
You can configure Unused resources operations by selecting Settings.
| Chart | Description |
|---|---|
| Total potential savings by service category | Total savings to expect if all Unused resources recommendations are applied by service category such as Compute, Database, and Storage. |
| Total potential savings by change group | Total savings to expect if all Unused resources recommendations are applied by change group such as Change Management and Application Development. |
| Recommendation tab | Description | Available actions on selected recommendations |
|---|---|---|
| New | Resources that are candidates for Unused resources. Each successful execution of a Billing Download job triggers the Budget Forecast, Business Hours, Reservation Plans, Rightsizing, and Unused resources jobs to analyze the
spend and usage data of resources and to update the actionable recommendations in reports. Note: Microsoft Azure only: The Azure Advisor service generates the recommendations that appear in Rightsizing and Unused resources reports. Cloud Cost Management doesn’t generate the recommendations. |
|
| Scheduled | Resources that are scheduled in Unused resources jobs. |
|
| Completed | Resources that the Unused resources job terminated or stopped. | None |
| Declined | Resources for which owners didn’t want to perform any action or declined the change request. |
|
| Failed | Resources for which the Unused resources operation wasn’t successful. |
Note: If you perform any action on the terminated or stopped virtual machines, the recommendations get completed but don't show up in the Failed recommendations tab. |
| Excluded | Resources that are configured not to be considered for Unused resources. | Remove from exclusion |
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Configuration item | Unique identifier of the resource. |
| Monthly savings | Potential savings if the resource is resized to the recommended size. |
| Provider | The provider that hosts the resource. |
| Service category | Lists all service categories from the instance sorted by name. |
| Cloud service | Lists all cloud categories sorted by name. |
| Current size | Size of the resource that was analyzed for. |
| Rationale | The reason that the system recommends terminating or stopping.
|
| Confidence | The confidence level in a recommendation.
|
| Change Group | Change group for the resource. |
| Account | The service account that includes the resource. A service account represents a group of related regions in your provider account. |
| Region | If appropriate for the provider, region in the service account that hosts the resource. |
| Owned by | Owner of the resource. |
| Source | Source of the recommendations.
|