Monitoring your AWS Marketplace Costs and Usage

The AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors, which makes it easier to find, test, buy, and deploy software on AWS. Using AWS Marketplace, you can buy a wide variety of software solutions that meet your database, storage, security, business intelligence, and other business needs.

Recently, AWS Marketplace announced the first wave of procurement system integrations, making Coupa Software available as the first supported system. This is an excellent opportunity to review how you can quickly get started with analyzing, controlling, and optimizing the costs and usage associated with your AWS Marketplace purchases.

AWS Cost Management provides important tools to help you monitor your expenses and spend your resources wisely. This post walks you through the process of monitoring your AWS Marketplace costs using Cost Management tools like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and the AWS Cost and Usage Report.

Monitoring your AWS Marketplace costs using AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. This makes it easy to identify your usage trends, isolate cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

Using the Billing Entity filtering dimension, you can filter your costs so that only costs associated with AWS Marketplace surface in your report. You may have to expand the list of available filtering dimensions to access the Billing Entity filter.

For reference, I adjusted the following Cost Explorer chart to group each bar by the individual AWS Marketplace offerings I chose to analyze using the Service grouping dimension. I then narrowed the timeframe to the past two months and changed the data granularity to Daily. Finally, to make the chart easier to read, I changed the chart type to a Stacked Bar chart.

To discover more detailed information regarding your AWS Marketplace costs, you can use the standard filtering dimensions, such as Linked Account or Usage Type.

Understanding your AWS Marketplace costs using the AWS Cost and Usage Report

The AWS Cost and Usage report contains the most detailed set of AWS cost and usage data available. It includes additional metadata about AWS services, pricing, and reservations (for example, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances). Using the AWS Cost and Usage report, you can identify your AWS Marketplace expenses using the bill/billingEntity column and dive deeper into your cost and usage information from there.

AWS delivers the AWS Cost and Usage report (in CSV format) to whichever Amazon S3 bucket you specify and updates the reports at least one time per day. The Cost and Usage report itself is free, but you still must pay the standard Amazon S3 storage rates.

Using AWS Budgets to monitor your AWS Marketplace costs

Using the Billing Entity filtering dimension, you can filter your expenses so that AWS Budgets tracks costs associated with AWS Marketplace. You can further refine your budget to track your AWS Marketplace costs by selecting individual AWS Marketplace offerings from within the Service filter. This narrows the focus of your budget to track only the costs associated with your purchased AWS Marketplace offerings.

Conclusion

The ease and convenience of AWS Marketplace provide plenty of temptation to overspend. But with every new improvement in the service, it is important to review common sense practices and check your own practices. This post provided a high-level overview of how you can use the AWS Cost Management product suite to monitor your AWS Marketplace costs. Do you have your own techniques for tracking your AWS Marketplace costs? If so, share a comment here!