How can this be done with MINIMAL effort?
Use AWS Budgets to report on low utilization of EC2 instances.
Run an AWS Systems Manager script to check for low memory utilization of EC2 instances.
Run Cost Explorer to look for low utilization of EC2 instances.
Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to identify EC2 instances with low utilization.
Explanations:
AWS Budgets is used to set custom cost and usage budgets, but it does not provide instance-level utilization data or cost-saving recommendations.
AWS Systems Manager can run scripts to check metrics like memory utilization, but this requires manual setup and does not directly provide cost savings.
Cost Explorer has a built-in feature to identify underutilized EC2 instances and provides estimated cost savings for them with minimal effort.
CloudWatch can monitor resource utilization, but analyzing and identifying underutilized instances would require manual effort and setup.