Cost & Usage Explorer – Cloud Cost

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
Filters
Deep Dive
Legend
Data Shape
Table
Usage
Rate
Goals
Share URLs

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

When you want to focus only on the cost of specific resources, you can filter the costs by Region, Linked Account,Service, Cost Center, Tags, and more. Each filter is multi-select, so you can select more than one value at a time.

Click the filter icon to display/close the list of available filters on the left of the Explorer window, as shown below. After selecting the relevant filters, click Apply. You can also click the Include link for each filter to exclude specific values for that filter.

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.

Data Shape

Anodot Cost enables you to quickly switch between different representations, by selecting the relevant option from the Graph Options list, as shown below. Note that the actual icon shown on the Graph Options button changes according to the option selected.

Table display

The table display (accessed from the Graph Options button) has a filter feature that enables you to display the data in different ways. You can use either string or number filters, as indicated below. Click on the filter icon to select the relevant filter option.

String filter options Number filter options

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.

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

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.

{[{category.name}]}