Let us start this article by having a basic understanding of Cloud Visibility.
So, what is Cloud Visibility?
The capacity to see every activity in your cloud in detail is referred to as cloud visibility. This means you can detect security concerns as well as poor cloud performance. In a nutshell, it is the capacity to retrieve any data you require from your clouds.
This helps in a variety of factors like:
- You can implement cost-cutting initiatives
- Analyze the performance deeply
- Enact corrective steps in real-time
What is the actual challenge of cloud cost visibility?
Well, it is really important to expand the cloud footprint. You must be able to assign AWS bill charges to the appropriate cost center, understand how services are supplied and configured, and see all of this data in ways that are valuable to several stakeholders with varying priorities.
Given below are the tools that can help you with Cloud Visibility:
- AWS Budget: Regular budget reports can be generated by the budget tool also customers may use it to build budgets for specific periods and manage expenditures, use, and utilization of Savings Plans or Reserved Instances.
It can integrate and operate with other AWS services like the Cost Explorer tool, AWS Service Catalog, etc.
Here are the advantages of this tool:
- Comprehend your costs over time and include or remove specific items like tax and refunds. Also, track your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans’ cost, consumption, or coverage and utilization.
- Select to get pre-scheduled Budgets Reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
- Create yearly, quarterly, monthly, or even daily budgets based on your company’s requirements
- AWS Cost Explorer: It allows you to view, analyze, and control your AWS expenses and use them over time. Create custom reports that examine the cost and use data to get started quickly.
This tool helps the users to consult about different saving plans, launch a variety of AWS services, filter down the service cost, and provide fresh and new reports for the AWS service costs.
It can help in:
- Integrate your data usage and cost programmatically
- Estimate your AWS bill, and set alarms and budgets accordingly
- Retrieve your data by activating hourly and resource level granularity
- AWS Cost Categories: This tool allows you to categorize cost and consumption data according to your needs. Also, you may construct custom categories and map your cost and use statistics into these categories using multiple dimensions such as account, tag, service, charge type, and even additional cost categories.
It can help you with:
- You may construct multilayer hierarchical relationships among your cost categories
- Create different rules that correspond to your company’s own business and organizational frameworks
- Assign the charges among your Cost Category values using split charge rules
But before you perform functions with these tools, here is the list of things that you need to consider-
- Acknowledge the fact that all resources in the environment follow the account configuration settings and tags on which these tools rely
- As a consequence of changes applied to the bill at the end of the month, there may be a large discrepancy between AWS service pricing and actual expenses paid to the client
- Try to assemble the right data according to your needs using solid combinations of the relevant tools
- Organizations that use AWS for containerized workloads must ensure that their systems can account for the particular cloud financial management problems that come with them
- It is crucial to safeguard the previous information as if an asset’s tag is changed or the asset is removed, AWS tools will lose the asset’s history.
Here we come to the end of the article and to sum it up, we have discussed the basics of cloud visibility, the three major tools that can improve cloud visibility, and the points to consider before using any of the tools.
All of these tools mentioned solve a variety of problems and challenges of cloud cost visibility that we will discuss in the next article.