Account & support
Cost Advisor
An AI review of everything you run on Edge (VM utilisation, storage, CDN traffic, DNS and add-ons) that identifies wasted spend and capacity pressure, with specific recommendations and the dollar amounts to back them up.
On this page7 sections
How to use it#
- Open Billing in the console and switch to the Cost Advisor tab.
- Click Analyse My Account. The analysis covers your last 7 days of resource metrics and takes about 30 seconds.
- Review the efficiency score, spend breakdown, VM utilisation charts and prioritised recommendations. Each one names the exact resource and the action to take.
What it analyses#
- VM right-sizing: Seven days of CPU, memory and disk metrics per VM. A VM averaging 3% CPU with low memory use gets a downsize recommendation and the exact monthly saving; a VM pinned at 100% gets an upgrade recommendation instead.
- Waste detection: Stopped VMs still paying for allocated disk, unused extra IPs, forgotten snapshots and add-ons you may no longer need: everything idle that still costs money.
- Capacity pressure: Usage approaching plan limits, memory above 85%, disks nearly full. These are situations where more capacity costs less than the outage it prevents.
- Plan fit: Whether your total usage fits a cheaper plan, whether annual billing would save you money and, for pay-as-you-go accounts, where your hourly spend actually goes.
- Protection gaps: Production VMs without snapshots, DNS zones without backups, low CDN cache-hit rates hammering your origin. These are cheap fixes that prevent expensive problems.
Recommendation types#
Every recommendation carries a monthly dollar figure, so you can see exactly what acting on it does to your bill.
| Type | Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Saving | Save $X/mo | Genuine waste. Downsizing, removing or consolidating cuts your bill by this amount. |
| Investment | +$X/mo | More capacity or an upgrade where the data shows pressure. Costs more; prevents worse. |
| Protection | Protection | Backups, snapshots and resilience gaps worth closing. |
| Free | Free | Configuration improvements that cost nothing, such as cache tuning and housekeeping. |
Efficiency score#
Each analysis produces a spend-efficiency score from 0 to 100. It measures how well your resources match your actual usage.
| Score | Rating | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 80–100 | Well optimised | Resources match usage; little or no wasted spend found. |
| 50–79 | Room to improve | Some over-provisioned or idle resources worth acting on. |
| 0–49 | Significant waste | Meaningful monthly savings available from right-sizing. |
How the dollar amounts work#
Savings are computed from your real pricing, never estimated by the AI:
- Pay-as-you-go accounts: Compute bills hourly, so downsizing or deleting a VM is a direct cash saving at the published per-resource rates. Stopped VMs still pay for their allocated disk, and the Advisor will tell you so.
- Subscription plans: Compute is included in your plan, so downsizing a VM frees headroom rather than cutting the bill. The real saving the Advisor looks for is whether your total usage fits a cheaper plan.
If your account is already efficient, the report says so and lists what you’re doing right. The Advisor never pads a report to look useful. It will also sometimes recommend spending more, when seven days of data show a resource under real pressure.
What data it uses#
The Advisor works from aggregate usage data only: per-VM resource metrics, storage totals, CDN request counts, DNS query volumes, add-on inventory and your plan’s pricing. It never reads the contents of your VMs, buckets or zones.
Saved results#
Analyses are saved automatically. When you return to the Cost Advisor tab, your most recent report is shown with the date and time it was run. Click Re-analyse at any time for a fresh report. Your last ten reports are kept.
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