Often, when companies are new to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they aren’t focused much on the cost. They’re more likely fixated on taking advantage of the scalability and flexibility offered by the cloud.
As a company’s AWS cloud infrastructure grows, it will find that its cloud costs grow as well. As the number of AWS accounts increases over time, there’s a higher chance of overspending on unnecessary cloud resources. This is when most companies begin to realize the importance of managing cloud costs.
However, controlling AWS costs is no simple task, especially in enterprises with highly distributed teams, erratic legacy applications, and complex lines of dependency. Managing the AWS cloud bill can be a headache for IT managers, especially as cloud use grows and the bill becomes more complex. Costs can quickly spiral out of control when companies expand their cloud to roll out a new app, launch in a new region, or migrate part of their data center.
Getting visibility into AWS cloud costs
Although AWS Billing and Cost Management allows you to view your usage and spending, with the sheer amount of data available, it’s tough to find key insights with which you can make usage predictions or build strategies. On top of this, AWS Free Tier can sometimes fail to send alerts when you provision a service. With the Billing feature in Applications Manager’s AWS monitor, you get visibility into your AWS cloud costs and can optimize your spending based on usage.
The AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard helps you evaluate your biggest AWS investment assets. If you have numerous AWS accounts, it facilitates and simplifies your AWS accounting by helping you plan your AWS costs, triggering alerts for set thresholds on budgets, and offering a cost explorer and a budget tool that:
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Ensures that your plan is within your allocated budget or within the limits of the AWS Free Tier.
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Provides insights about your daily and Reserved Instances (RI) usage.
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Gives you an idea of current estimated charges from AWS and provides an estimate as to how much your predicted usage will incur in charges.
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Keeps an eye on your budget utilization.
With ManageEngine Applications Manager, you can learn about the health of all your AWS resources. Monthly charges incurred are depicted by expenditure and forecast graphs, which can be drilled down to a specific day in the month. It also offers machine learning-enabled analytics that forecasts costs through the rest of the month. It plots services and tax graphs that give you information about the total cost of AWS services and their taxes.
Applications Manager also shows Month-to-Date Top Services by Spend graphs that provide you with comprehensive financial information about your spending for all the AWS services you’re using.
At a single glance, you can identify and isolate the service you spend the most on. This helps in making informed decisions about your monthly AWS budget. Furthermore, Applications Manager ensures you stick to your budget by alerting you when a set budget crosses a threshold.
Start tracking AWS costs in just a few minutes
If you’re already an Applications Manager user, you can start tracking your AWS costs from the Billing tab of your AWS monitor. If not, you can start a 30-day free trial today and begin monitoring AWS costs along with your other AWS services, on-premise technologies, and web applications—all from a single platform.
