CloudSpend Cost Category Reports
Cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control without a proper understanding of where the money is being spent. AWS offers a tool called Cost Categories that allows you to group and categorize costs across various dimensions, including accounts, services, tags, charge types, and usage types.
When paired with a cloud cost management tool like CloudSpend, this categorization becomes even more insightful. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the Cost Category report, highlighting its benefits, its functions, and how it helps businesses optimize cloud costs.
What is a Cost Category report?
Cost Categories in AWS are essentially filters or groupings that you can set up to organize your cloud expenses. CloudSpend syncs with these Cost Categories from AWS, allowing you to set budgets, schedule reports, and dive deep into spending analysis.
Each report in CloudSpend has a Report Name, Tag Key, and Tag Value. These tags and names provide the foundation for analyzing your costs across various sections, like Accounts Splitup, Cost by Service, and Cost by Region, making it easier to identify where your organization is spending the most.
Why use the Cost Category report?
Understanding cloud spending goes beyond simple line items. You need the ability to drill down into details and make decisions based on actionable insights. Here are some compelling reasons to leverage CloudSpend’s Cost Category report:
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Enhanced financial visibility: Gain a clearer picture of where your cloud budget is being consumed, broken down by individual services, accounts, or projects. This granular insight is essential for understanding trends and taking corrective action.
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Simplified cost allocation: Allocate costs to different business units, projects, or departments accurately. This ensures that you know exactly how much each segment is spending so you can allocate resources accordingly.
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Improved decision-making: Make better decisions about how to optimize resources, reduce unnecessary costs, and plan for future growth with detailed insights into your spending patterns.
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Customizable views: Tailor the reports to suit your needs by focusing on the most relevant data. You can view the reports by different time periods or drill down to specific categories like data transfers or instance types.
Anomaly detection and more
The Anomaly section displays any discrepancies or unusual cost spikes that occurred. This lets you investigate the anomalies and understands the root causes.
Accounts Splitup
The Accounts Splitup section is a breakdown of the total costs by individual AWS accounts. You can dive deeper into this data by checking the Resource Explorer section, which shows which accounts are driving the most resource consumption. This allows you to allocate your cloud budgets more effectively.
Cost by Component
The Cost by Component section provides a look at how different infrastructure components contribute to your overall costs. By understanding this, you can optimize resource use and reduce unnecessary expenses.
Cost trends
One of the most important aspects of cost management is recognizing trends. The Trend section lets you visualize cost patterns over time, allowing you to forecast future expenses and plan your budgets more accurately.
Cost by Service
The Cost by Service section breaks down expenses by AWS services like Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and Relational Database Service. This helps you identify the services that contribute the most to your costs, allowing for a more targeted approach to cloud cost management.
AWS Cost Categories combined with CloudSpend’s reporting capabilities provide businesses with a powerful tool for managing and optimizing cloud costs. By categorizing expenses across different accounts, services, and tags and drilling down to various cost components, companies can gain critical insights into their spending patterns.
With detailed breakdowns by individual accounts, regions, services, resources, and more, CloudSpend’s Cost Category report empowers businesses to optimize their cloud usage, identify anomalies, and drive cost-efficient cloud operations. Refer to our documentation on the Cost Category report to learn more.
