(Cost and Usage) Data Exports Dashboard by Amazon QuickSight
Learn to analyze Cost and Usage data effortlessly using AWS Data Exports and Amazon QuickSight. This article shows how to extract valuable insights.
Published Jan 29, 2024
🚀 Get more value from your billing and cost management data with customized exports and pre-built Amazon QuickSight dashboards.
✨ New AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that enables you to create exports of your billing and cost management data using SQL column selections and row filters. You can now also deploy a Cost and Usage Dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight directly from the AWS Billing console. The Cost and Usage Dashboard uses a summary view of the AWS Cost and Usage Report and provides pre-built visuals to facilitate interactive analysis and sharing of cost insights with a broader stakeholder group who may not have access to AWS console.
🎉 AWS Data Exports is now available to all customers.
It was announced on re:Invent
It was announced on re:Invent
First, the Cost and Usage Dashboard offers an integration between AWS Billing and Cost Management console and Amazon QuickSight. Therefore, you no longer have to worry about creating data flows and managing underlying dependencies. Second, the pre-built visuals in the Cost and Usage Dashboard cover the most common use cases, such as reviewing month over month trends, giving you a quick overview of your AWS costs and usage. Third, you can share Cost and Usage Dashboard with a wide variety of stakeholders including the ones who don’t have access to the AWS console. You can also embed this dashboard in your team wikis, apps or portals to increase cost awareness and accountability across the organization.
With over 100 visuals, the Cost and Usage Dashboard provides a high-level overview of your AWS spend while giving you the ability to dive deeper into individual AWS services.
Some key use cases of the Cost and Usage Dashboard include:
- Effective savings rate: The Billing Summary tab allows you to get visibility over all of your savings and discounts in a single place and track effective savings rate for your organization, and measure impact of your cost optimization efforts.
- Interactive month over month (MoM) trends: In the MoM Trends tab, you can see interactive month over month trends allowing you to quickly understand the most significant changes within your workloads by AWS service, account, region down to API operation. Clicking on any item in a visual will dynamically filter the other visuals based on your selection, helping you concentrate on what matters most to you.
- Service specific cost and usage: With service specific tabs such as Compute, Storage, Databases, Amazon S3 you can gain insights into those categories or services. For example, Data Transfer and Networking tab provides you an easy way to track your data transfer cost and usage, as well as categorizes data transfer charges for ease of understanding.
S3 for cost dashboard export
With Cost and Usage Dashboard, we are making it easier for you to create financial awareness within your broader organization, and in a way that is easily customizable to meet varying degrees of your cost analytics needs. Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service which gives you the full flexibility to slice and dice, and visualize your AWS costs from different perspectives. You can bring additional organizational context (such as cost centers, budget allocation, performance metrics, etc.) to build tailored insights for each specific application team. You can also use row-level security to restrict access to your dataset with user-based rules. We recommend you to create a copy of the Cost and Usage Dashboard before customizing your dashboard in QuickSight.
Create your own visuals and dashboards: You can create a copy of the Cost and Usage Dashboard using the “Save as” option in QuickSight. This action creates a new QuickSight analysis that you can customize to fit your needs. You can rearrange the visuals based on your preferences or create a separate tab with only the visuals that matter to you. Once you are done with your customization, you can publish it as a new dashboard. Learn more about how to customize dashboards in QuickSight.
Combine AWS cost and usage data with third party data sources: Many FinOps use cases such as tracking business unit cost like number of customers, transactions or bookings require combining AWS cost and usage data with your business operations. You can bring these business metrics from any of the data stores supported in QuickSight and overlay it alongside your costs to see the business impact.
Provide stakeholders access to cross sections of the data: With Cost and Usage Dashboard, you can apply Row-Level Security in QuickSight by providing a mapping between the user and their corresponding linked accounts. This way engineers or a product owners can only see the data for workloads/accounts they have permission to see. Learn more about Row-Level security in QuickSight here.
To create the Cost and Usage Dashboard, navigate to the “Data Exports” page under the AWS Billing and Cost Management console, and click on the Cost and Usage Dashboard tile on the Data Exports home page.