AWS Cloud Financial Management

Category: Amazon QuickSight

Using the right tools for your cloud cost forecasting

We’re at the final blog of our forecasting series! If you’ve been following along the past few weeks, you have explored creating a process for more effective forecasting, establishing a forecasting culture, and building driver-based forecasting. It is now time to put pen to paper and create your forecast. But where do you start? How […]

ICYMI: Manage and control your Amazon S3 storage costs, cloud architecture patterns, and resource configuration changes

Check out this month’s top 3 resources to help you manage billing and control your costs, including how to manage storage costs, and increasing control and visibility over your cloud architecture patterns and resource configurations.

Visualizing Your Eligible On-Demand Compute Expense for AWS Savings Plan

Voiced by Amazon Polly One of the most common questions we get from customers is how to manage compute costs for resources like Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many offerings to help you optimize spending, one of which is AWS Savings Plans. You can receive up to 72% […]

Trends Dashboard with AWS Cost and Usage Reports, Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight

AWS cloud usage data is a critical component in the IT Financial Management process for AWS customers. As organizations grow in cloud maturity, the cloud usage data may become complex as usage incurs from distributed teams and businesses. Financial and Technology leaders need access to trends, signals, insights, and cost deviations to quickly understand and analyze the cloud usage. The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) provide comprehensive data about your AWS costs, including information related to product, pricing, and usage. By including the Resource IDs and choosing hourly time granularity, CUR allows you to analyze your costs in greater detail and accuracy. You can download the CUR reports from the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) console, query the reports using Amazon Athena or load the reports into Amazon Redshift or visualize in Amazon QuickSight.

How unit metrics help create alignment between business functions

Voiced by Amazon Polly   As the last blog in the Unit Metric series (intro, what is unit metric, selecting a unit metric to support your business, unit metrics in practice – lesson learned), we’ll share how unit metrics is instrumental in gaining alignment across business functions. High quality unit metrics create an opportunity to […]

Cost Control Blog Series #1: Good intentions don’t work, but cost control mechanisms do!

Gartner estimates a 70% overspend on cloud resources by organizations who do not have a defined plan for cloud cost management. While cloud brings lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), an effective billing management and cost control mechanism is required to make sure you only pay for what you need, and it also empowers your […]

AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Labs Updated

  AWS’s breadth of resource options and purchase models allow you to design your infrastructure in a most cost-efficient way possible.  You can start by identifying idle and underutilized resources with services such as AWS Cost Explorer Recommendations, matching your resource capacity with business demand using services such as Instance Scheduler, and taking advantage of […]

Cost Allocation Blog Series #4: Visualize Data Transfer Costs with Cost and Usage Reports, Athena, and QuickSight

The right level of visibility into the shared costs allows organizations to understand the main drivers for these costs and provides insights into cost optimization opportunities. In this blog post, we will share tips on how you can visualize data transfer cost details available in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) for analysis using Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. 

Cost Allocation Blog Series #1: Cost Allocation Basics That You Need to Know

If it’s Everyone’s job, it’s No One’s job. On our team, we take this lesson to heart and always make sure there is a clear owner for everything we do.  This helps ensure everyone is responsible for specific tasks or goals, and will not be bystanders, assuming someone else will pick up the work. The […]