AWS Cloud Financial Management

New – Cost and Usage Dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight

Today, we announced the general availability of Data Exports, a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that enables you to create exports of your billing and cost management data using SQL column selections and row filters. As part of AWS Data Exports, you can now also deploy a Cost and Usage Dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight directly from the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. The Cost and Usage Dashboard uses a summary view of the AWS Cost and Usage Report 2.0 (CUR 2.0) and provides pre-built visuals to facilitate interactive analysis and sharing of cost insights with a broader stakeholder group who may not have access to AWS console.

Benefits of the Cost and Usage Dashboard

First, the Cost and Usage Dashboard offers an integration between AWS Billing and Cost Management console and Amazon QuickSight. Therefore, you no longer have to worry about creating data flows and managing underlying dependencies. Second, the pre-built visuals in the Cost and Usage Dashboard cover the most common use cases, such as reviewing month over month trends, giving you a quick overview of your AWS costs and usage. Third, you can share Cost and Usage Dashboard with a wide variety of stakeholders including the ones who don’t have access to the AWS console. You can also embed this dashboard in your team wikis, apps or portals to increase cost awareness and accountability across the organization.

Exploring the Cost and Usage Dashboard

With over 100 visuals, the Cost and Usage Dashboard provides a high-level overview of your AWS spend while giving you the ability to dive deeper into individual AWS services.

Figure 1: An example of the Billing Summary tab of the Cost and Usage Dashboard

Figure 1: An example of the Billing Summary tab of the Cost and Usage Dashboard

Some key use cases of the Cost and Usage Dashboard include:

  • Effective savings rate: The Billing Summary tab allows you to get visibility over all of your savings and discounts in a single place and track effective savings rate for your organization, and measure impact of your cost optimization efforts.
  • Interactive month over month (MoM) trends: In the MoM Trends tab, you can see interactive month over month trends allowing you to quickly understand the most significant changes within your workloads by AWS service, account, region down to API operation. Clicking on any item in a visual will dynamically filter the other visuals based on your selection, helping you concentrate on what matters most to you.
  • Service specific cost and usage: With service specific tabs such as Compute, Storage, Databases, Amazon S3 you can gain insights into those categories or services. For example, Data Transfer and Networking tab provides you an easy way to track your data transfer cost and usage, as well as categorizes data transfer charges for ease of understanding.
Figure 2: An example of visuals in the Cost and Usage Dashboard

Figure 2: An example of visuals in the Cost and Usage Dashboard

How is Cost and Usage Dashboard different from the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) solution?

Cost and Usage Dashboard is an easy to deploy, secure and pre-built dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight. It is inspired from the open-source project Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) and includes a subset of the summary visuals without the resource level views from the CUDOS dashboard (one of the 6 Cloud Intelligence Dashboards). Cost and Usage Dashboard brings the benefits of CUDOS solution into the AWS Billing and Cost Management console as an AWS feature, and eliminates the need for maintaining the underlying infrastructure like Amazon Athena views or AWS Glue crawlers. You can deploy the Cost and Usage Dashboard from the Data Exports page in the Billing and Cost Management console. CID on the other hand, uses AWS CloudFormation template-based deployment that uses Athena and Glue crawlers for data orchestration. You can set up the complete CID solution by visiting AWS Well-Architected Labs.

What else can I do in Amazon QuickSight with the Cost and Usage Dashboard?

With Cost and Usage Dashboard, we are making it easier for you to create financial awareness within your broader organization, and in a way that is easily customizable to meet varying degrees of your cost analytics needs. Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service which gives you the full flexibility to slice and dice, and visualize your AWS costs from different perspectives. You can bring additional organizational context (such as cost centers, budget allocation, performance metrics, etc.) to build tailored insights for each specific application team. You can also use row-level security to restrict access to your dataset with user-based rules. We recommend you to create a copy of the Cost and Usage Dashboard before customizing your dashboard in QuickSight.

Create your own visuals and dashboards: You can create a copy of the Cost and Usage Dashboard using the “Save as” option in QuickSight. This action creates a new QuickSight analysis that you can customize to fit your needs. You can rearrange the visuals based on your preferences or create a separate tab with only the visuals that matter to you. Once you are done with your customization, you can publish it as a new dashboard. Learn more about how to customize dashboards in QuickSight.

Combine AWS cost and usage data with third party data sources: Many FinOps use cases such as tracking business unit cost like number of customers, transactions or bookings require combining AWS cost and usage data with your business operations. You can bring these business metrics from any of the data stores supported in QuickSight and overlay it alongside your costs to see the business impact.

Provide stakeholders access to cross sections of the data: With Cost and Usage Dashboard, you can apply Row-Level Security in QuickSight by providing a mapping between the user and their corresponding linked accounts. This way engineers or a product owners can only see the data for workloads/accounts they have permission to see. Learn more about Row-Level security in QuickSight here.

How do I create the Cost and Usage Dashboard?

To create the Cost and Usage Dashboard, navigate to the “Data Exports” page under the AWS Billing and Cost Management console, and click on the Cost and Usage Dashboard tile on the Data Exports home page. Learn more and watch the re:Invent breakout session “Interactive cost reporting with Amazon QuickSight“.

Anand Tripathi

Anand Tripathi

Anand Tripathi is a Sr. Product Manager at AWS. He is a seasoned professional in product management with a rich background spanning diverse roles in startups and Fortune 500 companies. Anand has a proven track record of successfully launching and managing a spectrum of products, and excels in driving business strategy. Throughout his career, Anand has played a pivotal role in delivering multiple successful products, establishing a robust track record in both technology and business realms.

Rohit Pujari

Rohit Pujari

Rohit is a senior leader of product management at AWS, where he focuses on building customer-centric integrations with QuickSight. Rohit has 15+ years of experience in the data analytics space, and he is passionate about building user-centric solutions that empower teams to become more proficient with data.

Yuriy Prykhodko

Yuriy Prykhodko

Yuriy is a Senior Technical Account Manager based in Luxembourg. He helps AWS customers build highly reliable and cost effective systems and also achieve operational excellence while running workloads on AWS. He is also cost optimization SME and Cloud Intelligence Dashboards author and lead. In his free time he enjoys playing basketball and traveling all around the world.