You can now analyze AWS Marketplace AMI software spend using cost allocation tags

Starting November 2019, Amazon Machine Images (AMI) deployed on AWS Marketplace will inherit tags from their corresponding Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. This update provides greater spend management visibility into your AWS Marketplace software costs. Additionally, it will not impact your billing process or invoiced amount. You can use tags to categorize, allocate, and perform cost reporting on AWS Marketplace usage-based AMI spend. Existing and new Amazon EC2 instance tags will now automatically populate against corresponding AWS Marketplace AMI usage.

Once activated, you can use Cost Allocation Tags to identify and track AWS Marketplace AMI usage. You can use the tools accessible via AWS Cost Management or your preferred cloud spend analysis tool.

In this post, I show the key spend management features you can now enable. I show how to do the following through AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR):

1. Use tags to identify your AWS Marketplace AMI software usage in AWS Cost Explorer
2. Use tags to set AWS Budgets for AWS Marketplace AMI software usage or spend
3. Use tags to identify and categorize AWS Marketplace AMI software usage line items in the AWS CUR

Prerequisites

In this post, I assume familiarity with AWS cost management tools. If you are new to cost management for AWS Marketplace, start by reading this blog post.

Use tags to identify your AWS Marketplace AMI software usage in AWS Cost Explorer

In AWS Cost Explorer, you can filter and group your AWS Marketplace AMI-based usage spend by cost allocation tags. The following image shows the three AWS Marketplace AMIs purchased on my account in a stacked bar chart view, denoted by different colored sections. The pfSense pay-as-you-go (PAYG) AMI is in purple, the Netgate PAYG AMI is in green, and the pre-paid AMI is in pink.

Note the pink section that shows “No Tagkey” on October 16. This denotes the upfront charge on my pre-paid AWS Marketplace AMI. Tagging upfront charges is not supported by AWS. It will continue to show up in Cost Explorer without an associated cost allocation tag.

To filter and group your AWS Marketplace AMI-based usage spend by cost allocation tags, do the following:

• At the bottom of the right sidebar, for the Billing Entity filter dimension, select Include only and select AWS Marketplace from the drop-down menu. This narrows down your AWS Cost Explorer view to only show your AWS Marketplace charges. See the following screenshot showing this Billing Entity selection.

• In the upper left, set your grouping dimension by selecting Group by and choose your Tag Key. In this example, my Tag Key is ‘Product.’ The green and purple column sections now show the newly-available tag values on two of my products accruing PAYG AWS Marketplace AMI-usage spend.

You can customize your own views and create reports for cost analysis using tags in combinations of grouping and filtering dimensions. For example:

• To analyze total AWS Marketplace charges by software service, adjust the Group by dimension and select the Service To isolates costs for a specific software service use the Service filter on the right side.
• To analyze total AWS Marketplace costs by linked accounts in your AWS Organization, navigate to the Group by dimension and select the Linked Account To isolate costs for a specific linked account, use the Linked Account filter on the right side.

­­

Use tags to set AWS Budgets for AWS Marketplace AMI software usage or spend

Using AWS Budgets, you can create a budget by filtering on both Billing Entity and Tag. This enables a more granular way to monitor and track your AWS Marketplace AMI software usage and spend. Create this AWS Budget using the following steps:

• In the AWS Billing Console, select Budgets and choose the Create budget
• Enter your budget type and select dates and amounts. Then select a fixed or monthly budgeted amount.
• To isolate budgeted spend based on AWS Marketplace as billing entity, select the Billing Entity filter option.
• Select the Tag filter and choose the tag key and values you want to budget against. From the products I’m running, I’ve chosen the Tag Key: Product and Tag Values: Netgate and pfSense. See the following screenshot.

• At the last step, enter your email and customize your budget alerts to notify you when you’ve reached certain thresholds of your budgeted amount. You can also use Amazon Simple Notification Service, or AWS Chatbot to create budget alerts.

Alternatively, you can also create an AWS Budget by only filtering on specific tag values without specifying Billing Entity. This will capture and track all usage based spend under those tag values inclusive of AWS Marketplace AMI software usage charges.

Use tags to identify and categorize AWS Marketplace AMI software usage line items in the AWS Cost and Usage Report

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a more granular tool to track your AWS usage and charges. This report is often the source of data for third-party cost management tools. The following screenshot shows a subset of the columns and line items available in the AWS CUR. This CUR provides both infrastructure and AWS Marketplace software charges associated with EC2 tags, shown on separate line items.

Conclusion

In this post, I explained the updates we have made to AWS Marketplace AMI software usage tagging. I also showed how you can use them to get more spend visibility using AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and the AWS CUR.

About the author

Shu He is a Sr. Product Manager on the AWS Marketplace team based in Seattle, WA.