To control cloud costs better, you need a better understanding of what you are paying for and where each dollar is going. Anodot Cost provides a unique Cost & Usage Explorer that gives you the ability to truly understand your billing.
To access the Cost & Usage Explorer, in the left navigation bar, click Cost & Usage > Cost & Usage Explorer.
Cost & Usage Explorer Features
The Cost & Usage Explorer provides a number of features that help you understand your billing, customize your display, and create advanced reports, including:
Grouping X by Y
You can select how to group costs by selecting up to two groupings from the Group By and By lists: service, region, linked account, cost center and user tags.
The two-levels of groupings enables you to group all services by the linked accounts.
For example:
Filters
To learn more about the filtering option click here.
Deep Dive
When the second group level is Date, you can deep dive into the chart by clicking on the relevant data on the chart. For example, when you want to understand the spike on November 7th for the CloudFront service, you can click on the CloudFront data on the chart, as indicated below.
In the top left corner, you can see the Path bar that indicates where you are located in your deep dive. You can continue to deep dive until you arrive at the resource level, as shown below. If you want to return to the previous step, use the Path bar and click on the relevant step.
Legend
Use the legend at the bottom of the screen to drill down to specific services. You can click on an individual service to add/remove it from the displayed chart.
Note:
By default, up to 45 items are presented in the graph and legend, in case there are more than 45 you can select additional items using the 'Items' selection. The 'Select all' button is available only if there are fewer than 100 items. In case there are more it will be disabled.
Data Shape
Table display
You can select the column(s) you want to show on the the table by clicking on the icon on the right side of the chart.
Cost types
The Cost & Usage Explorer enables you to review your costs according to the following cost types: Unblended/ Amortized/ Net-Unblended/ Net-Amortized/ Distributed costs.
AWS:
- Unblended: reflects the exact prices you'll be invoiced for from AWS. The Cost Type considers Discounts, Savings Plan charges, and RI, which appear in the invoice as distinct line items.
- Amortized: Amortized Cost relies on the Unblended Cost but also amortizes any upfront or recurring RI and Saving Plan charges across the resources they apply to spread across the billing period. This amortization is based on the amount of usage and therefore reflects the effective cost, considering the reduced rate from RIs and SPs.
- Net Unblended: The net unblended cost is the unblended cost after factoring in any discounts, credits, or other adjustments. This reflects the actual amount you are billed by AWS after taking into account any negotiated discounts, reserved instances, or other cost optimization measures applied to your AWS account (EDP Discounts, Private Rate Discounts, RI Volume Discounts, etc).
- Net Amortized: This Net Amortized cost amortizes the upfront and monthly reservation fees while including discounts such as RI volume discounts (EDP Discounts, Private Rate Discounts, RI Volume Discounts, etc).
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Distributed: In the distributed cost model, SP's fees will be moved from the account that purchased them to the resources that are using them.
Azure:
- Actual Cost: The costs of resource consumption without reservations.
- Amortize Cost: take upfront reservations into account. If you have reserved instances in your Azure environment, you will likely want to see the daily or monthly quota of this reservation. This cost view splits the reservation quota into daily billing.
GCP:
- Actual Cost
Usage
The Cost & Usage Explorer enables you to analyze usage, as well as cost. When you click on the Usage toggle you need to select which quantity type you want to see.
As shown below (EC2 > Compute), you can see the number of servers you have for each instance type, and then use Usage > Hours to view the hours used for each server.
Rate- Cost/Usage KPI generator
Using the Cost & Usage Explorer, you can also show the cost rate of a unit, meaning the ratio between cost and usage. This functionality is known as the Anodot Cost Rate.
Note that when you select the Rate functionality, you need to select the relevant cost and usage types: select a cost type (Unblended, Net Unblended, Amortized, Net Amortized, or Public Cost) and usage type (Hours, Requests, Bytes, Other, or Quantity) from the dropdown lists.
Goals
Use the Goals feature to monitor your cost metrics more closely by showing a “goal” on top of your usage stats (in the Cost & Usage Explorer). This enables you to compare actual to planned cost/usage/rate, and, in turn, set an alert for when a specific goal is reached.
To access Goals, click the View Options button, and then select Show Goal. In the displayed list of Goals, click on the Goal you want to display (note that only one Goal can be displayed at any one time). You can create a new Goal by clicking the Save & Export Options button, and then selecting Save as Goal > Create new.
Share URLs
After setting filters and other display parameters, as listed in the above sections, you can share a link to the displayed output with other users who have access to the same linked account, subscriptions, or projects. Users without this access cannot view the displayed data.
To share a URL of the displayed data, click the Copy Link icon and then share with the relevant users.