Chris Engelbert There is one question in life that is really hard to answer: “What is your actual AWS EBS volume usage?”
When talking to customers and users, this question is frequently left open with the note that they’ll check and tell us later. With storage being one of the main cost factors of cloud services such as Amazon’s AWS, this is not what it should be.
But who could blame them? It’s not like AWS is making it obvious to you how much of your storage resources (not only capacity but especially IOPS and throughput) you really use. It might be bad for AWS’ revenue.
Why We Built This
We believe that there is no reason to pay more than necessary. However, since it’s so hard to get hard facts on storage use, we tend to overprovision—by a lot.
Hence, we decided to do something about it. Today, we’re excited to share our new open-source tool - the AWS EBS Volume Usage Exporter!
What makes this particularly interesting is that, based on our experience, organizations typically utilize only 20-30% of their provisioned AWS EBS volumes. That means 70-80% of provisioned storage is sitting idle, quietly adding to your monthly AWS bill. Making someone else happy but you.
What Our Tool Does
The EBS Volume Usage Exporter runs in your EKS cluster and collects detailed metrics about your EBS volumes, including:
- Actual usage patterns
- IOPS consumption
- Throughput utilization
- Available disk space
- Snapshot information
All this data gets exported into a simple CSV file that you can analyze however you want.
If you like convenience, we’ve also built a handy calculator (that runs entirely in your browser - no data leaves your machine!) to help you quickly understand potential cost savings. Here’s the link to our EBS Volume Usage Calculator. No need to use it, though. The data is easy enough to get basic insight. Our calculator just automates the pricing and potential saving calculation based on current AWS price lists.
Super Simple to Get Started
To get you started quickly, we packaged everything as a Helm chart to make deployment as smooth as possible. You’ll need:
- An EKS cluster with cluster-admin privileges
- An S3 bucket
- Basic AWS permissions
The setup takes just a few minutes - we’ve included all the commands you need in our GitHub repository.
After a successful run, you can simply delete the helm chart deployment and be done with it. The exported data are available in the provided S3 bucket for download.
We Want Your Feedback!
This is just the beginning, and we’d love to hear from you!
Do the calculated numbers match your actual costs?
What other features would you find useful?
We already heard people asking for a tool that can run outside of EKS, and we’re looking into it. We would also love to extend support to utilize existing orchestration infrastructure such as DataDog, Dynatrace, or others. Most of the data is already available and should be easy to extract.
For those storage pros out there who can answer the EBS utilization question off the top of your head - we’d love to hear your stories, too!
Share your experiences and help us make this tool even better.
Try It Out!
The AWS EBS Volume Usage Exporter is open source and available now on GitHub. Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!
And hey - if you’re wondering whether you really need this tool, ask yourself: “Do I know exactly how much of my provisioned EBS storage is actually being used right now?”
If there’s even a moment of hesitation, you should check this out!
At simplyblock, we’re passionate about helping organizations optimize their cloud storage. This tool represents our commitment to the open-source community and our mission to eliminate cloud storage waste.
Questions and Answers
What is the EBS Volume Usage Exporter?
The EBS Volume Usage Exporter is an open-source tool developed by simplyblock to track disk usage inside your Amazon EBS volumes. Unlike CloudWatch, it provides filesystem-level metrics, enabling more accurate cost and capacity monitoring for your AWS storage.
Why isn’t CloudWatch enough for EBS volume monitoring?
AWS CloudWatch only shows volume-level metrics like read/write ops or latency—it doesn’t expose actual disk usage. That’s where simplyblock’s exporter fills the gap, giving detailed insights for smarter EBS cost optimization.
How can I reduce AWS storage costs using this tool?
By exposing real-time volume usage, you can detect underutilized or idle EBS volumes and resize or consolidate them accordingly. Combined with volume tiering strategies, this can significantly cut AWS storage costs.
Is the exporter compatible with Kubernetes?
Yes, the exporter can run as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes clusters using EBS-backed volumes. It’s especially useful in environments where you run databases on Kubernetes and need precise disk usage visibility.
Where can I find the source code for the EBS usage exporter?
The full source code is available on simplyblock’s GitHub repository, linked in the blog post. It’s open source and ready for customization to fit your observability or infrastructure monitoring pipeline
