AWS has added support for additional cost metrics and filtering capabilities to its finance management tool, Budgets, which is designed to help enterprises keep track of their expenditure by setting custom usage thresholds on various services individually or for the entire enterprise.
The tool alerts enterprise users when the thresholds are exceeded or are forecasted to exceed when users add or change demand requirements.
The additional support for cost metrics includes creating thresholds for new cost metrics, such as net unblended costs and net amortized costs.
This addition, according to AWS, will allow enterprises to monitor costs after discounts have been applied and other factors, such as a savings plan or upfront fee, have been included in the calculation.
This should help enterprises plan for the actual cost of AWS services, ensuring alignment between budgeted amounts and actual invoiced costs, the company wrote in a blog post.
AWS said that as part of the update, enterprise customers can now also exclude dimension values when creating a budget.
Dimensions, in the context of the AWS tool, are filters that can be set to break down the cost and usage of AWS services more granularly, helping enterprises identify areas of cost optimization.
According to AWS, budgets can be filtered on the basis of specific AWS services, regions, linked accounts, and cost allocation tags, among others.
Currently, AWS allows enterprises to set up 20,000 budgets within the tool, with each budget giving the option of setting up five alerts that can be emailed to 10 subscribers.
AWS said that the tool allows enterprises to set up two action-based budgets for free. No fee would be charged if the budgets if the budgets are set up without any actions.
The updates to cost metrics and filtering options are available in all AWS regions, except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions.
Source:: Network World