AWS accounts often accumulate unused EC2 instances over time. These instances, often remnants of workload migrations, auto-scaling misconfigurations, developmental tests, or orphaned resources from discontinued projects, drive up unnecessary costs without delivering value. 

Stopping idle instances is one of the most effective cloud optimization strategies. For every dollar saved on an instance, two more dollars are saved on accompanying storage, network and database charges.

nOps Essentials is thrilled to unveil a feature making it easy to eliminate these wasteful hidden costs. Now, you can halt idle EC2 instances with a single click. And stopped instances (unlike terminated ones) can be easily reactivated if necessary, minimizing risk and ensuring you retain full operational flexibility to roll back if needed.

How it works:

  1. Connect your AWS account to nOps
  2. nOps will automatically collect data from your CloudWatch. If your instance has less than 1% CPU utilization used continuously over 30 days, it’s considered idle.
  3. Our recommendations exclude
    1. ASG and EKS Instances
    2. Instances that support ephemeral storage
  4. Once you accept a recommendation, nOps will leverage EventBridge and Lambda functions to automatically stop your instance.

For instructions on how to get started, visit nOps help.

  • One-click apply. With nOps, saving time and money is just a click away. Review recommendations through a unified dashboard showing the historical data backing each recommendation, then approve to act on the recommendation.
    Screenshot of Review recommendations and one-click apply in the nOps dashboard
    Review recommendations and one-click apply in the nOps dashboard
  • Intelligent Recommendations. At nOps, we prioritize your operational integrity. Algorithms are rigorously engineered to only generate suggestions with minimal risk of disruption. You can view detailed resource consumption data for each identified instances, giving engineers confidence beyond a shadow of a doubt to take action.
    Screenshot of nOps dashboard showing that recommendations are backed by viewable resource consumption data including CPU, Network, Memory and more.
    Recommendations are backed by viewable resource consumption data including CPU, Network, Memory and more.
  • Continuous monitoring. nOps constantly scans your workloads for new savings opportunities, so you stay continuously optimized. 

One-click stop idle EC2 instances is just the latest feature to be added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. With Essentials, you also get: 

An illustration for the nOps Scheduler and its features and benefits.

  • Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
  • Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
  • One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates 

nOps is constantly releasing more features to automatically keep your cloud environment optimized, so you can focus on what matters most: building and innovating. 

nOps manages over $1.5 billion in AWS spend and was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category. Book a demo to find out how to save in just 10 minutes.