Amazon S3 Storage Analytics and Insights

As you grow from storing hundreds to millions or billions of objects, and from terabytes to petabytes of data on Amazon S3, it becomes increasingly valuable to gain visibility into your storage usage. Amazon S3 offers a number of features to help you better understand, analyze, and optimize your storage at scale.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens

S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into object storage usage, activity trends, and makes actionable recommendations to optimize costs and apply data protection best practices. S3 Storage Lens is the first cloud storage analytics solution to provide a single view of object storage usage and activity across hundreds, or even thousands, of accounts in an organization, with drill-downs to generate insights at multiple aggregation levels. Drawing from more than 16 years of experience helping customers optimize their storage, S3 Storage Lens analyzes organization-wide metrics to deliver contextual recommendations that make it easy to take immediate action.

Amazon S3 is used to store large shared datasets across tens to hundreds of accounts and buckets, multiple Regions, and thousands of prefixes. With S3 Storage Lens, you can easily understand your storage and analyze it to detect outliers. All Amazon S3 customers can access an interactive S3 Storage Lens dashboard in the S3 Console containing pre-configured to receive 28 metrics and 14 days of historical data. For deeper visibility, you can upgrade to Storage Lens advanced metrics and recommendations, that includes 15-months data retention, 35 additional metrics across 4 categories (activity, advanced cost optimization, advanced data protection, and detailed status code metrics), prefix-level aggregation, and CloudWatch metrics support.

Learn more about Amazon S3 Storage Lens »

Amazon S3 Inventory

S3 inventory is a feature that helps you manage your storage. S3 Inventory provides a report of your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an S3 bucket or prefix. This report can be used to help meet business, compliance, and regulatory needs by verifying the encryption, and replication status of your objects. You can also use S3 Inventory reports to speed up business workflows and big data jobs.

S3 Inventory reports include corresponding metadata such as bucket names, key names, last modification dates, object size, storage class, replication or encryption status among other properties. S3 inventory reports can be delivered daily or weekly and can be encrypted to protect sensitive data. It can also be configured to deliver multiple reports that deliver different types of metadata that are relevant to your specific needs. It provides a list of your objects and their corresponding metadata for an S3 bucket or a shared prefix, which can be used to perform object-level analysis of your storage. 

With Amazon S3 Inventory, you can audit encryption status of objects for security and compliance, track the replication status of objects to another S3 bucket, speed up business workflows and big data jobs, and identify target objects for S3 Batch Operations.

The power of S3 Inventory: Advanced use cases and best practices (23:14)

Amazon S3 Storage Class Analysis

S3 Storage Class Analysis enables you to monitor access patterns across objects to help you decide when to transition data to the right storage class to optimize costs. You can then use this information to configure an S3 Lifecycle policy that makes the data transfer. S3 Lifecycle policies can also be used to expire objects at the end of their lifecycles. If you observe that your access patterns are frequently changing, you can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering which automatically moves your data based on changing access patterns between 4 access tiers that include a frequent access tier, a lower-cost infrequent access tier, an archive access tier and a deep archive access tier for cost savings. Storage Class Analysis also provides daily visualizations of your storage usage on the AWS Management Console that you can export to an S3 bucket to analyze using business intelligence tools of your choice such as Amazon QuickSight. To learn more about Storage Class Analysis, visit the Storage Class Analysis documentation guide.

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