Reserved Instance Reporting
Reserved Instance Reporting refers to the RI coverage and utilization reports built into AWS Cost Explorer — it is a report type within Cost Explorer, not a standalone AWS service.
Key points
- Not a separate service — RI coverage and utilization reports live inside AWS Cost Explorer’s Reservations section alongside the Reservations Overview page.
- Provides two report types:
- RI coverage reports — visualize RI coverage and monitor it against a coverage threshold.
- RI utilization reports — visualize daily RI utilization.
- Target (threshold) utilization is shown as a dotted line on the utilization chart, with bars color-coded by status:
- Red bar — RIs with no hours used.
- Yellow bar — under the utilization target.
- Green bar — reached the utilization target.
- Gray bar — instances not using reservations.
- RI utilization reports can be exported to PDF and CSV formats.
- Covers reservations beyond EC2 as well — Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache reservations can also be tracked via these reports.
- Reserved Instances themselves can provide savings of up to 72% compared to on-demand pricing, with capacity reserved in a specific Availability Zone.
- Distinct from AWS Budgets, which can set RI utilization/coverage alert thresholds — RI Reporting itself only visualizes historical coverage and utilization data, it doesn’t send alerts.