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ITOM2025.05.16 · 5 min read

Detecting a Silent Cloud Cost Anomaly

A misconfigured auto-scaling policy spun up 340 EC2 instances over a weekend. Nobody noticed — until ITOM did.

Use Case 03

Hybrid cloud environment. Budget: $180K/month. A dev environment auto-scaling policy was misconfigured during load testing on a Saturday night.

What's Actually Happening (Without ITOM)

340 EC2 instances spun up over 6 hours. No production alert fired. Discovered on day 28 of billing cycle — projected spend: $312,000.

What ITOM Does — Step by Step

  1. Discovery module continuously inventories all cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and on-prem
  2. Detects dev-environment EC2 count increase of 1,847% over a 6-hour Saturday window
  3. Flags as anomalous: no change ticket associated, deviation from historical weekend baseline
  4. Auto-alert fires at 11:23 PM Saturday with cost projection and policy identification

ITOM Alert Output

> ITOM Alert: Cloud Resource Anomaly
> Environment: AWS-DEV-VPC
> EC2 count: 18 → 340 (in 6 hours)
> Projected additional cost: $94,000/month
> No change ticket associated
> Policy: auto-scale-dev-unrestricted

Without ITOM vs. With ITOM

Without ITOM: Discover on day 28 of billing cycle. Invoice: $312,000. Excess spend: $130,000.

With ITOM: Engineer terminates instances Sunday AM. Total excess spend: ~$1,200.

Key Metrics

  • 1,847% — Resource count spike
  • $130K — Cost prevented
  • 11:23 PM — Alert fired (same night)
  • ~$1,200 — Actual excess spend

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