How to Monitor AWS Costs

Ways to monitor your AWS costs and usage

Amazon Web Services is currently dominating the cloud market. They provide a multitude of services, and it’s easy to lose track of everything you are running. Which is why it’s important to take control of your bill. You may want to manage your AWS costs to keep track of your future spending. Perhaps you’ve increased your AWS usage because customers are depending more on your services. Continue reading to learn about ways to monitor your AWS cost.

Keep a check on your AWS utilization every day. Doing so will allow you to stay on top of any surprises that may occur. Identifying resources that are low or idle utilization will let you delete them before they start incurring extra costs. A quick glance at your bill will help you spot any surge in costs in the last few days.

There are several monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your AWS cost.

1. Amazon CloudWatch is a metrics repository that gives you a view of different AWS resources, services and applications running on AWS and on-premise servers. It lets you monitor application performance, operational issues and constraints, and resource consumption. Users are able to keep operations in order and fix any technical issues. CloudWatch is commonly used with instances of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). It also oversees volumes of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), and can also go on to take custom data from external sources.

2. AWS Trusted Advisor provides real time instruction so you can follow AWS best practices by provisioning your resources. You can also integrate it with the CloudWatch to discover and respond to any changes in the Trusted Advisor status checks. Trusted Advisor can remove unused and idle resources. It checks your service limits to improve service performance and improves application security. Trusted Advisor also checks for service limits (more than 80% of usage), however, it does take up to 24 hours for any changes to show.

3. AWS Cost Explorer allows you to see and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can set a custom time period depending on how often you’d like to view your data. It forecasts future costs and usage, and allows you to save your progress.

4. Billgist gives a simple overview of your cost into your inbox daily. The current AWS billing console is limited because it only displays your costs without notifying you about a surge in the bill. Continuously monitoring costs daily can be a little cumbersome for most non-technical users Billgist allows you to easily catch a sudden rise in AWS bills. You don’t have to log into AWS console every day or nag your AWS administrator for updates. Billgist tracks changes over time and be aware of the incurred costs of the services created by your development team.

We talked about how to keep a check on your AWS utilization every day. Identifying resources that are low or idle will let you delete them before they start incurring extra cost. There are several monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your AWS cost. The cloud can be customizable and user-friendly. It can also be cost-effective, especially after implementing an easy-to-use cost monitoring tool.