Tag: AWS Cost Management

1. AWS Budget.
   1. AWS budget gives us the ability to set custom budgets and alerts when costs or usage exceeds the forecast.
   2. Set reservation utilization or coverage targets to get alerts when utilization drops below the threshold.
   3. Set up Budget dashboard to create, track and inspect budgets.
   4. Budget dashboard provides ability to create , edit and manage budgets and status of each budget.
   5. Budgets can be created at the monthly, quarterly or yearly level.
   6. Cost can be tracked with multiple dimensions such as service, linked accounts, tags etc.
   7. Using budget dashboard we can select the subset of budget for our report, provide delivery frequency and specify up to 50 email recipient.
   8. Alert is triggered using SNS.
   9. Budget report delivery by email incurs a cost of $0.01.
2. AWS Cost Explorer.
   1. Interface to visualize, understand and manage cost.
   2. Helps to create custom report at high level (e.g. total cost and usage across all accounts) or specific requests (e.g. specific instance type for an account for a project).
   3. Can be used to perform deep dive into cost and usage report, identify trends, pin point anomalies and pinpoint cost drivers.
   4. Filter and Group data in different dimensions.
   5. Forecast future cost and usage.
   6. Direct access to the analytics engine that power Cost explorer.
3. AWS Cost and Usage Report.
   1. Lists AWS usage for each service category used by an account and its IAM users.
   2. Reports can be hourly or daily items or tags allocated by cost allocation purposes.
   3. Understand the AWS implementation and identify areas of optimization.
   4. Track Reserved Instance usage and where discount was allocated.
   5. Integrates with Amazon Athena. Can be queried for cost and usage information. Supports upload data into Redshift or Amazon QuickSight.
   6. If Amazon Athena integration is enabled Cost and Usage report is delivered in the compressed Apache Parquet files to S3 bucket. Or it can be directly ingested into Redshift or uploaded to QuickSight.
4. Reserved Instance Reporting.
   1. It helps to manage and monitor Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Redshift reservations.
   2. RI Utilization report allows us to visualize RI utilization (i.e., the percentage of purchased RI hours consumed by instances during a period of time), to identify and act upon opportunities to increase your RI usage efficiency (e.g., by modifying RI types or shifting workloads to match the constraints of active Reserved Instances).
   3. RI Coverage report allows us to discover how much overall instance usage is covered by Reserved Instances.It helps to make informed decision about when to buy or modify Reserved Instance for maximum coverage.

What else can I do with the AWS Cost and Usage report?

You can configure your Cost & Usage Reports to integrate with Amazon Athena. Once Amazon Athena integration has been enabled for your Cost & Usage Report, your data will be delivered in compressed Apache Parquet files to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice. From there, you can use an out-of-the-box AWS CloudFormation template to perform a one-time configuration of an AWS Glue crawler. This will ensure that your latest cost and usage information is always available to Amazon Athena – with no additional work required to prepare your data for analysis. The AWS Cost & Usage Report can also be automatically uploaded into Amazon Redshift and/or Amazon QuickSight. In order for this to work, ensure that you select the option for receiving an Amazon Redshift and/or Amazon QuickSight manifest file when setting your report preferences.