Manage unused resources
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Summary of Manage unused resources
The Manage unused resources feature in ServiceNow helps reduce cloud costs by identifying unused resources and scheduling jobs to power off or terminate them. It analyzes spend and usage data to generate actionable recommendations, enabling customers to optimize their cloud environment by eliminating waste.
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Key Features
- Recommendations and Savings Insights: 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-saving actions.
- Recommendation Tabs and Actions: Resources are categorized as New, Scheduled, Declined, Completed, Failed, or Excluded, each with specific actions such as scheduling, rescheduling, excluding, or removing from exclusion.
- Data Sources and Confidence Levels: Recommendations derive from cloud provider data (AWS, Azure, GCP) or ServiceNow custom analysis, with confidence levels based on data usage duration and resource family matching.
- Configurable Operations: Customers can configure the processes for unused resource management, set notification thresholds based on potential savings, and decide whether to power off or terminate resources.
- Job Scheduling and Management: Resources can be added to, moved between, or removed from scheduled Unused resources jobs. Customers can view and manage both upcoming and completed jobs.
- Exclusion Capability: Specific resources can be excluded from unused resource analysis while continuing cost and usage data collection, allowing flexibility in managing exceptions.
Key Outcomes
- Improved cost control by identifying and acting on idle or underutilized cloud resources.
- Automated scheduling of power-off or termination actions to reduce unnecessary cloud spend.
- Clear visibility into potential savings categorized by service type and organizational change groups for targeted optimization.
- Enhanced operational control with the ability to customize, exclude, and manage resource lifecycle actions within the ServiceNow platform.
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.
|