Optimizing AWS Costs: Setup Cost & Usage Dashboard in 5 minutes

In the cloud-native era, managing costs is as critical as leveraging the benefits of cloud services. AWS provides a robust tool, the Cost and Usage Dashboard, to help you track and analyze your cloud spending. It offers a comprehensive view of your costs across different services, regions, and time periods.

• Track and analyze your cloud spending: Monitor your costs over time and identify areas for optimization.
• Understand your usage patterns: Gain insights into how different services are being used and identify potential cost-saving opportunities.
• Compare costs across different time periods: Compare your current spending to past trends and identify areas where costs have increased or decreased.
• Export data: Export your cost data to CSV format for further analysis in external tools.

AWS Data Exports:

AWS Data Exports enables you to create exports of your billing and cost management data, such as cost and usage or cost optimization recommendations, using basic SQL delivered to your designated S3 bucket on a recurring basis for use with your business intelligence or third-party reporting solutions.

AWS Data Exports also enables you to visualize your billing and cost management data by integrating with Amazon QuickSight, and deploying a pre-built Cost and Usage Dashboard within minutes.

Setup Cost and Usage Dashboard powered by QuickSight:

Pre-requisite:

Sign up for QuickSight in your Management account if not already done. Also,select your desired authentication method.

Configuration:

1. In AWS Management account, open ‘Billing and Cost Management’ and click on ‘Data Exports’

1. Click on ‘Cost and Usage Dashboard’

1. Choose export type option as ‘Cost and usage dashboard powered by QuickSight’

1. Enter QuickSight username of already configured QuickSight account

1. Enter a destination in Amazon S3 where your data export will be stored

1. Choose ‘Create a new service role’ under service access and click ‘Create’

1. Data Export has created the dashboard successfully and is ready to be accessed

1. Click on ‘Cost and usage Dashboard’ link and you will be directed to QuickSight dashboard

1. Initially, there will be no data as it takes around 24 hours for data to be populated in dashboard

1. After 24 hours, you will find your billing data for your AWS Organization(accounts) in the dashboard and data under different categories can be explored

Sample dashboard : https://cid.workshops.aws.dev/demo?dashboard=cudos

AWS Cost and Usage Dashboard (CUR) offers several advantages for managing your cloud spending:

Comprehensive Visibility:

• Detailed cost breakdown: See your costs broken down by service, region, and time period.
• Usage patterns: Understand how different services are being used and identify potential cost-saving opportunities.
• Historical data: Analyze past spending trends to identify areas for improvement.

Cost Optimization:

• Identify cost-saving opportunities: Find areas where you can reduce costs by optimizing usage or choosing more cost-effective options.
• Compare costs across different time periods: Compare your current spending to past trends and identify areas where costs have increased or decreased.

Data-Driven Decision Making:

• Export data: Export your cost data to CSV format for further analysis in external tools.
• Create custom reports: Create custom reports to analyze your spending based on your specific needs.
• Make informed decisions: Use data-driven insights to make informed decisions about your cloud spending.

Improved Efficiency:

• Avoid overspending: Prevent unnecessary costs by understanding your usage patterns and making informed decisions.

Compliance and Governance:

• Track spending against budgets: Monitor your spending against predefined budgets.
• Ensure compliance: Ensure compliance with internal or external spending guidelines.
• Provide evidence: Provide evidence of cost management practices to auditors or stakeholders.

By setting up data exports from the AWS Cost and Usage Dashboard, you can gain deeper insights into your cloud spending and make informed decisions to optimize your costs. With the flexibility to export data to S3 and analyze it using various tools, you can tailor your analysis to your specific needs and achieve significant cost savings.

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Comments

[Lingesh B AWS Community Builders]

How do you monitor costs and analyze the cost patterns ? Do you use Cost & Usage report dashboards or Cost Explorer ?