Using CUDOS Dashboard visualizations for AWS Marketplace spend visibility and optimization

You can now view and optimize your costs related to AWS Marketplace via the Cost and Usage Dashboards Operations Solution (CUDOS) Dashboard, where recent updates enable AWS Marketplace spend visibility. The CUDOS Dashboard is one of six dashboards that make up the AWS Cloud Intelligence Dashboards framework. CUDOS Dashboard provides the most comprehensive cost and usage details, with resource level granularity to help you optimize cost, track your usage goals, and achieve operational excellence.

CUDOS Dashboard has added several updates:

• Two new visualizations now show AWS Marketplace spend by Legal Entity and AWS Marketplace spend detailed view.
• You can now filter by legal entity, which means you can search for AWS Marketplace costs, fees, and usage based on the seller of record.

In this post, Yuriy and I will show how to use the changes to the CUDOS Dashboard to analyze your AWS Marketplace costs, gain insights, and spot trends. The Analyze AWS Marketplace Usage and Costs Using the CUDOS Dashboard video also provides a tutorial.

Using the CUDOS Dashboard

To use the CUDOS Dashboard, sign in to Amazon QuickSight. In the left menu panel, select Dashboards, and then select CUDOS Dashboard. You can now use the new features to view your spend, analyze your aggregate spend, and create visualizations.

Viewing your AWS Marketplace spend by seller of record

To view your AWS Marketplace spend by seller of record, do the following:

1. In the CUDOS Dashboard header bar, select the Executive: MoM Trends tab.
2. At the top of the tab, in the Controls section Billing Entity dropdown, select AWS Marketplace.
3. In the Controls section, in the Legal Entity dropdown, search for and select AWS Marketplace seller of record.

Analyzing your aggregate AWS Marketplace spend

To view or analyze your aggregate AWS Marketplace spend, do the following:

1. In the CUDOS Dashboard header bar, select the Executive: MoM Trends tab.
2. At the top of the tab in the Controls section, leave all control filters set to All. The AWS Marketplace section has a preconfigured filter that sets billing entity to AWS Marketplace.
3. To visit the newly published AWS Marketplace section, scroll to the bottom of Executive: MoM Trends tab.

AWS Marketplace section visualizations

The first visualization in the AWS Marketplace section on the Executive: MoM Trends tab is AWS Marketplace spend by Legal Entity. The legend in the right pane of the visualization shows the legal entities. This visualization enables you to choose any AWS Marketplace vendor to visualize costs displayed in the graph over a period of time. You can dive into the details in the chart or export the data used to construct the visualization. You can also interact with the visualization by selecting a legal entity.

The following screenshot shows the AWS Marketplace spend by Legal Entity visualization:

• Aggregated month-over-month costs are depicted in the visualization with embedded legal entities combined in monthly, stacked, and color-coded bars.
• There is one stacked bar within each month.
• The x-axis shows month and year from left to right, and the y-axis shows a spend value range from the lowest to the highest aggregated monthly spend value.
• A trend line follows the month over month stacked bars.
• A legend of legal entities in the right pane with color codes representing sellers of record. Refer to the following screenshot.

AWS Marketplace spend by Legal Entity

The second visualization in the AWS Marketplace section on the Executive: MoM Trends tab is AWS Marketplace spend detailed view. This visualization identifies all your AWS Marketplace products incurring costs in a table view. The column headers include Charge Type, Product Name, Account, Unit, and Usage Month, with a breakdown of usage and cost by month. This visualization enables you to view the usage and costs for AWS Marketplace products as well as the AWS accounts incurring charges over time. You can explore the data within the table or export the data used to build the visualization. You can also interact with the visualization by expanding and collapsing rows and columns within the visualization.

Exporting views and downloading visualization content

To export the view of the Executive: MoM Trends tab into a PDF, follow these steps:

1. In the CUDOS Dashboard header bar, select the Executive: MoM Trends tab and set the visualizations by expanding or collapsing rows and columns as you want them to be viewed when you export.
2. In the top right corner of the menu bar, choose the download icon, and select Generate PDF.
3. To view the PDF, choose the download icon again, select View downloads, and select Download.

To download content from a visualization, follow these steps:

1. In the CUDOS Dashboard header bar Executive: MoM Trends tab, select the visualization you want to download.
2. In that visualization, expand or collapse rows and columns as you want them to be viewed when you export.
3. In the top right corner of the visualization pane, choose Menu options, and select Export.
4. Navigate to the top right corner of the menu bar. Choose the Download icon, select View downloads, and select Downloads.

Conclusion

In this post, Yuriy and I showed how to use the new features of the CUDOS Dashboard to better analyze your AWS Marketplace costs, gain insights, and spot trends.

Next Steps

• To access the CUDOS Dashboard, contact your cloud architect, security engineer, or Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) team member and ask them to deploy the CUDOS Dashboard. For step-by-step instructions, refer to the Cost Optimization section of AWS Well Architected Labs. You can deploy the CUDOS Dashboard programmatically following the Well Architected Lab steps.
• You can also learn how to analyze AWS Marketplace usage and costs using the CUDOS Dashboard by viewing the Analyze AWS Marketplace Usage and Costs Using the CUDOS Dashboard video here.

About the authors

Michael is an Engagement Success Manager for AWS Marketplace based in Atlanta. He focuses on enabling finance and business leaders to better understand the value of AWS Marketplace. Michael is also the Business Service Management connectors product leader. Business service management integrations enable AWS Marketplace business-to-business transactions in familiar enterprise tooling.

.

.

Yuriy is a Principal 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 head of Cloud Intelligence Dashboards at AWS.