Commitment Utilisation
The Commitment Utilisation view tracks how effectively your Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans are being used. Under-utilised commitments represent money already spent that is not delivering value — this page helps you identify and address that waste.
What is tracked
| Commitment type | What frugally.app monitors |
|---|---|
| Reserved Instances | EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, and OpenSearch RIs |
| Savings Plans | Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, SageMaker Savings Plans |
Utilisation vs coverage
These are two distinct metrics:
| Metric | Definition | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Utilisation | What percentage of your purchased commitment hours are actually being used | As close to 100% as possible |
| Coverage | What percentage of your eligible on-demand usage is covered by commitments | Depends on your commitment strategy |
Example
You purchased a 1-year RI for 10 EC2 m5.large instances. If only 7 are running at any given time:
- Utilisation = 70% — you are using 7 of 10 purchased instances
- 3 instance-hours per hour are wasted (paid for but unused)
If you also have 5 additional m5.large instances running on-demand:
- Coverage = 7 / 12 = 58% — 7 of your 12 total instances are covered by the RI
The utilisation dashboard
[SCREENSHOT: commitment-utilisation.png -- Commitment utilisation dashboard showing RI and Savings Plan utilisation percentages]
The dashboard shows:
| Widget | Description |
|---|---|
| Overall utilisation | Aggregate utilisation percentage across all commitments |
| By commitment type | Breakdown by RIs and Savings Plans |
| By service | Utilisation per AWS service |
| Trend | Utilisation over time (daily or monthly) |
| Expiring commitments | Commitments expiring in the next 30, 60, and 90 days |
Interpreting your utilisation
| Utilisation | Interpretation | Action |
|---|---|---|
| 95–100% | Excellent — commitments are fully used | Monitor for upcoming expirations |
| 80–94% | Good — minor waste, may be acceptable | Check if under-used commitments can be exchanged or modified |
| 60–79% | Needs attention — significant unused capacity | Review which instances are missing or stopped; consider exchanging unused RIs |
| Below 60% | Poor — substantial waste | Investigate root cause; consider letting commitments expire rather than renewing |
Recommendations for improving utilisation
- Right-size commitments — Match RI quantities to actual sustained usage, not peak usage
- Use flexible RIs — Regional RIs and Convertible RIs offer more flexibility to adapt to changes
- Coordinate with Automate — If you are stopping resources via Schedules, ensure those resources are not covered by RIs (stopping an RI-covered instance wastes the RI hours)
- Monitor expirations — Use the expiring commitments widget to plan renewals or adjustments
- Exchange unused RIs — Where AWS allows, exchange under-utilised Convertible RIs for types that match your current workloads
If you are using frugally.app Automate to stop non-production resources, buy RIs only for resources that run 24/7 (typically production). Non-production resources that are stopped overnight and on weekends will have low RI utilisation by design.
Data freshness
Commitment utilisation data is sourced from the AWS Cost Explorer API and follows the same caching and refresh schedule described in the Intelligence Overview. Data may be up to 24 hours behind for the current day.