Hacker News Reader

Why disk write usage? Assuming the reason for analysis is cost, storage space utilization is more important. GP2 and other non-provisioned IOPS types are priced per GB. I've seen EBS costs amount to 50% of the AWS bill at a couple companies, so reducing disk size can be a good cost saver[1]. You need an agent/script running in the OS to get disk space utilization.

[1] As another poster pointed out, sometimes you want to over provision size to get IOPS.

View on HN

Agree, disk write usage wouldn't show capacity utilization. One needs to look at the file system utilization and make necessary changes (such as resize) to eliminate wasted space. Our experience is that most customers are way over provisioned from a capacity (and even performance point of view). Various opportunities such as right-sizing (manually doing it is a pain), right-typing (selecting gp2, st1 or sc1) io1 IOPS adjustments are available to significantly the reduce storage cost. Automating those tasks is key so that the solution can scale without user action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com