Did Your Team Spike the AWS Bill?

Knowing cloud costs are going up, without identifying drivers, is more trivia than insight. When cloud bills start to creep, you need to have an answer to the question of “why?”

Control cloud bills by identifying both spikes in spend and the causes of those spikes. Split business’s spending and filter by team to determine your team’s impact on the most recent AWS bill—whether the number was high, low, or exactly what everyone expected.

Filter out the noise

Figuring out your team’s contribution to your org’s AWS bill will, like all issues of cost allocation, begin with tags and linked accounts. Your business will hopefully have an established taxonomy for using tags and accounts to identify resource usage across department, environment, team, and any other number of metrics that make sense for your infrastructure. By looking at the costs associated with the specific tags and accounts that your team uses, you can differentiate your spending from that of the org as a whole.

You can shave your org’s data down to certain tags or accounts within Apptio Cloudability by assigning tag- or account-based filters to a Cost or Usage Report:

However, when there’s a distinct subset of data that you’re regularly interested in—such as the cost and usage data generated by your team, specifically—you can take your filters a step further and apply them universally across the app using Cloudability Views. This way, you don’t have to manually apply them each time—all of the data that you see will be relevant to your specific KPIs.

Views can be built and assigned to users on your Cloudability account by any admin. If you’re an admin yourself, you can go ahead and create a View by clicking the “Manage Views…” option from the “Select View” menu. If you’re not, you can ask your account admin to build a View and assign it to you.

When you build a View, you assign filters just like you would for a Cost or Usage Report according to tag or account. Then, you select which users should have access to that View, and whether you want the view to be private, or discoverable by anyone at your org.

A user can be assigned multiple Views, and choose between those Views with the “Select View” menu. The Views parameter filters all widgets, reports, and data.

Dashboard with no view applied

Dashboard with view applied

Deliver the data

With your View of your team’s spending and usage data just a click away, you’ll have an easy reference point for reporting on your team’s impact on your org’s bill. Now, when your boss asks, you’ll have answers—but why wait for her to come to you?
You can keep stakeholders regularly informed about your team’s cloud use in several ways. First, you can share key reports on your team’s spending and usage using the “Share” button on any report. However, keep in mind that your View won’t transfer over—so if you’ve got a View filtered by tag or account, you’ll have to apply those filters to any report before you share them.

You can also use the “Subscribe” button located right next to the “Share” button to schedule an hourly, daily, or weekly delivery of key reports on your team’s spending and usage straight to your inbox. Not only will subscribing to reports ensure that you stay up to date, but it makes for super easy forwarding—so you can keep interested parties up to date, too.

Measure your impact

Whether you’re going over budget with untagged resources or achieving huge savings with Reserved Instances, knowing your team’s cloud costs is key to ensuring that your org is leveraging the power of the cloud effectively.
To drill into your own team’s cloud use with Cloudability Views, log in.