preview
We're still working on this feature, but we'd love for you to try it out!
This feature is currently provided as part of a preview program pursuant to our pre-release policies.
After your Cloud Cost Intelligence setup is complete, gain insights into your cloud expenditures through the Summary page. The Summary page offers a variety of widgets that deliver data regarding your cloud costs, along with various cost types.
Key features
The Summary page helps you to:
- View spending: View spending data across your cloud services, teams, and time periods, including usage metrics and cost allocation.
- View costs: With access to real-time estimates and detailed breakdowns, anticipate potential cost overruns.
- Optimize costs: Identify the top cost variances and untagged resources.
- Gain customized insights: Tailor your analysis by viewing costs through multiple filters, such as account, application, or team.
Cost types
Cloud Cost Intelligence provides a comprehensive view of your cloud expenditures through its interactive widgets. To gain deeper insights and optimize your financial management, you can view the data in these widgets categorized by different cost types. Each cost type offers a distinct perspective on your cloud expenses, whether you're analyzing daily charges or spreading costs over time. Here are the cost types you can utilize for a more tailored view:
Cost type | Description |
|---|---|
Blended costs | Reflects the average cost of usage across your consolidated billing family, including Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, On-Demand Instances, and tiered products. Blended costs are calculated by multiplying the blended rate for each service with your account’s usage of that service. |
Unblended costs | Represents usage costs on the day they're charged, showing costs on a cash basis. This can be used to review the Reserved Instances and Savings Plan costs on the exact day of charge. |
Net unblended costs | Your unblended costs after all applicable discounts have been applied. |
Amortized costs | Reflects costs in terms of accrual accounting, spreading expenses across the billing period. For example, if you pay a $365 upfront Savings Plan for one year, you'll see a $1 amortized cost per day. |
Net amortized costs | Amortized costs after all discounts are applied, providing a net view of accrued expenses. |
Data widgets
The Cloud Cost Intelligence (CCI) dashboard offers a range of data widgets that provide a comprehensive view of your cloud spending. Each widget delivers specific insights into different aspects of your expenditures, helping you track, analyze, and optimize costs effectively. Explore these widgets to gain a deeper understanding of your financial data and make informed decisions about resource allocation and cost management. Here’s a closer look at the available widgets:
Widget | Description |
|---|---|
Total cost | Displays your total cloud spend over a specified period for a holistic view of overall expenses. Quickly assess any significant increases or decreases. |
Average cost by selected granularity | Presents your average cloud costs based on the granularity selected in the UI, such as by hour, day, week, or month. This feature helps track spending patterns over time, allowing you to identify trends and fluctuations for proactive planning. |
Real-time cost estimate | Provides near real-time estimates of your cloud expenses based on recent telemetry and historical data. Explore further with a pane showing estimated total, estimated average hourly, and estimated live costs. |
Top 5 cost variance | Highlights the top five services or resources experiencing the most significant cost changes. |
Cost spread per region | Visualizes your cloud spending distributed across geographic regions. |
Tagged vs. untagged resources | Displays the cost proportion of resources tagged at the application and team levels in AWS, as reported in the Cost and Usage Report (CUR). Resources with custom tags outside these categories are classified as untagged. Standardized tagging enhances resource management and cost attribution. |
Service category costs | Summarizes costs across key cloud service categories, adapting dynamically based on your highest areas of expenditure. Categories typically include compute, storage, databases, network, taxes, and credits. |
Costs overview | Provides a consolidated snapshot of all cost-related data, which can be viewed by account, application name, billing entity, owning team, and service. |
Benefits
Utilizing the Summary feature provides significant advantages for managing your organization's cloud expenses:
Enhanced financial control: Gain a clear and comprehensive picture of your cloud spending, empowering you to make informed financial decisions and maintain control over your budget.
Proactive cost management: With access to real-time estimates and detailed breakdowns, anticipate potential cost overruns and address them before they impact your budget or operations.
Strategic resource allocation: Use insights from various widgets to optimize resource distribution across different accounts, applications, regions, and teams. Align resource usage with strategic business objectives for improved efficiency.
Targeted cost optimization: Identify the top cost variances and untagged resources to target for optimization. Focus on specific areas that offer the most potential for cost savings.
Customized insights: Tailor your analysis by viewing costs through multiple lenses, such as account, application, or team, enabling a deep dive into specific cost drivers that matter most to your organization.
By leveraging these insights and viewing options, you can control and optimize your cloud spending, ensuring effective financial management and strategic planning.