AWS Cost and Usage Reports
While cost dashboards, reports, alarms and budgets are great tools to get an overview on your cloud spend, they can’t provide a fully detailed look into all your costs. Being able to write queries against cost data, analyze your costs in detail and creating reports from these results is a great way to achieve full insight into your cloud expenditures.
AWS Data Exports
AWS Data Exports for billing and cost management is the recently launched update to AWS Cost and Usage Reports. They are more standardized and provide pre-built tooling to integrate with Athena and be able to run detailed queries in a matter of minutes. The exported data can be stored in S3 in the Parquet format, making it very dense and easy to query. Athena then builds a very affordable search service on top of that S3 data. If you haven’t worked with Athena before it’s also great for analyzing log data or other structured formats in S3.
AWS Quicksight Dashboards
The data included in the reports is very extensive. From
- details on the used resources
- their costs
- the type of cost
- tagging
- or cost groupings
you should be able to query and build reports to fulfill any requirements.
These results can then be used for AWS Quicksight Dashboards, another solution built into AWS, or used to create further reports that can be sent out to team members or leadership. The combination is powerful and can be configured in a relatively short amount of time. Especially for larger deployments across multiple accounts, potentially with multiple applications per account this fine-grained insight becomes very important.
Questions?
If you have any questions how to configure these services let us know, we’re happy to discuss your AWS pricing and cost questions with you.
