CUD Utilization (GCP)
CostLens flags Committed Use Discounts running below their utilization target, where the unused commitment is wasted spend.
CostLens flags under-utilized Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) — commitments running below their utilization target. A CUD you're not fully consuming is money already committed but not saving anything.
Advisory only
You can't reclaim the waste on a CUD you've already bought — the value is in re-scoping future commitments or shifting workloads to use the existing one.
How it works
Commitments are enumerated
CostLens lists active commitments across regions via the Compute aggregated API.
Utilization is checked
Utilization is read (best-effort) from Cloud Monitoring; commitments below ~75% are surfaced as advisory.
What to do
- Review why utilization is low — the covered resource type/region may have changed.
- Shift eligible workloads into the committed region/type to consume the discount, or right-size the next commitment.
Reading the finding
This is an advisory flag — it highlights the low-utilization commitment so you can act. Precise waste-cost attribution comes from your billing export (a planned enhancement).
Required permissions
- Detect: Compute read + Monitoring Viewer — see GCP Accounts.
Limitations
- CUD utilization isn't fully exposed by the Compute API — accurate utilization/cost attribution needs the BigQuery billing export, so this check may surface nothing until that source is connected.
- Advisory only — CostLens never modifies commitments.