Monitoring your savings

Monitoring Your Savings

Optimization without measurement is guesswork — track utilization and node count trends over time to confirm your changes are delivering real cost reduction and to catch regressions early.

Create a Cost Dashboard

To set up a CloudWatch dashboard to track cluster efficiency (node utilization and node count over time), see this create-cost-dashboard.sh.

Weekly Cost Review Script

Run a weekly report covering cluster version, node utilization, Spot/Graviton distribution, top consumers, pending pods, and orphaned volumes. Refer to weekly-cost-review.sh.

CloudWatch: Monitor Karpenter Savings

Use CloudWatch and Cost Explorer to validate that Karpenter's decisions translate into actual spend reduction — Spot adoption, instance right-selection, and consolidation should all be visible in your billing data. Refer to monitor-karpenter-savings.sh.