Reservation Expiration Alerts Now Available in AWS Cost Explorer

Reservations, sometimes referred to as Reserved Instances, offer a discounted hourly rate (sometimes up to 75%) compared to On-Demand resource usage, in exchange for committing to a one– or three-year term of service usage. Purchasing reservations to cover your AWS usage can translate into significant savings.

Starting today, you can use AWS Cost Explorer’s new reservation expiration alerts capabilities to receive email alerts 60, 30, or 7 days in advance of your reservation expiration date, as well as on the date of expiration. These notifications can be sent to up to 10 email recipients.

To turn on reservation expiration alerts, navigate to the Reservation Summary page, locate the reservation expiration Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in the top right corner, and click on the “Manage alerts” link. From there, simply indicate when you would like to receive reservation expiration alerts, and AWS will begin monitoring your reservation portfolio and automatically send you alerts.

Reservation expiration alerts are supported for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations.

To get started using reservation expiration alerts, you can go the AWS Cost Explorer webpage or refer to the Understanding Your Reservations With Cost Explorer user guide.