Cloud infrastructure may be considered cost-effective to set up as compared to on-premises infrastructure. Still, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control if you are not careful enough. Complicated AWS billing combined with complex cloud infrastructure and inefficient resource management can make it even more challenging to manage cloud costs.
If you don’t already have an AWS reporting tool for cost management to monitor cloud costs constantly, it’s time to get one. This blog discusses the importance of AWS cost reporting tools and the top AWS tools for cost management.
What Are The Benefits Of AWS Cost Reporting Tools?
Here are some of the many benefits of AWS cost reporting tools:
- Transparency in costs: With cost reporting tools, it becomes possible to get more visibility into cloud costs and better understand cloud spending patterns. It can also help identify areas where you can optimize usage and costs.
- Cost control: The most significant advantage of using a cost reporting tool is identifying where you are burning cash and getting better control. For instance, reporting tools can help you identify underutilized resources so that you can optimize your costs by rightsizing them.
- Better cost allocation: Cost allocation is necessary for establishing a culture of cost optimization across the organization, but setting up cost allocation tags can be very time-consuming. Cost reporting tools can automate the process of adding cost allocation tags and help you understand cloud spending across the different resources, applications, and business units.
- Cost forecasting: You can also easily forecast AWS costs for the coming years and plan your budget accordingly with detailed data about your current and past cloud spend collected through cost management tools. This also makes it easier to plan your cloud budgets efficiently.
Top AWS Cloud Cost Reporting Tools Your Business Need!
1- nOps
nOps is more than just an AWS reporting tool. It is a fully automated AWS cloud management platform that can decrease your cloud costs by up to 50% on autopilot. While your team focuses on their core responsibilities, nOps can automate cloud optimization to help you track, analyze, and optimize cloud costs. Using machine learning algorithms and AI, nOps learns about your cloud usage pattern and finds areas where you can effectively save costs on your AWS bill.
Here are some of the many cost management solutions offered by nOps:
- Business Contexts: It automates cost allocation tagging by establishing a tagging strategy and identifying both untagged as well as mistagged resources. You can create your own dynamic allocation rules based on tag categories, accounts, regions, and usage.
Risk-Free Commitment It offers real-time, risk-free and automated lifecycle management of EC2/ RDS commitments. So, you get the flexibility of on-demand instances with the savings of Reserved Instances.
- nSwitch: nOps uses its AI to learn more about your daily cloud usage pattern to identify idle resources and turn them off to save on cloud costs. It also helps you identify resource scheduling opportunities without wasting too much time or resources on analysis.
nOps AWS cost reporting functionalities can definitely be an asset to your business.
2- Amazon Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a cost management tool that provides detailed insights about your AWS cost patterns and usage. It offers customizable reports that can, in turn, help you analyze costs for different services and even identify areas of improvement. There is also an API that allows you to access Cost Explorer data through other AWS reporting or analytics tools.
Source: AWS
3- AWS Cost and Usage Report
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) provides a detailed breakdown of AWS costs, including the services used, the amount of usage, and the total costs associated with them. You will also find data categorized according to the different cost allocation tags.
But it’s important to note that CURs are essentially in spreadsheet format with thousands of rows and columns. Even if there is all the data you need present in a Cost and Usage report, it can be challenging to drive insights from it as there is no way to visualize all that data.
Source: LinkedIn
4- CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr markets itself as a total visibility checker cloud platform that aims to provide insights into AWS cloud costs and resources. Though CloudCheckr is not strictly a cost management tool, it can monitor cloud spending on AWS and, in turn, provide recommendations to improve overall cloud budgets. Apart from that, it also offers security and compliance management solutions.
Source: CloudCheckr
5- Densify
Densify is an AWS reporting tool that offers resource utilization monitoring and cost optimization solutions. It provides a complete view of the organization’s cloud infrastructure and in turn, provides suggestions for optimizing different cloud environments. While Densify’s features are a bit limited, especially when compared to the other tools on the list, it integrates with many other third-party tools to help report AWS data, which makes up for the missing features. But it can end up complicating things a bit.
Source: Densify
6- Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost management and optimization tool which claims to optimize cloud-based resources for their costs, quality, and speed. The tool can translate cloud bills and tags into in-depth insights, providing real-time clarity into overall cloud consumption. Cloudability tool by Apptio also provides solutions for resource management, compliance, and performance monitoring.
Source: Apptio
7- VMware Cloud Health
VMware Health provides cloud solutions for automation, performance, security, and cost management. The tool primarily focuses on optimizing multi-cloud environments while providing a centralized management dashboard for different resources, services, costs and applications. Since the tool is not entirely focused on AWS, it has limited advanced reporting capabilities when it comes to AWS reporting.
Source: VMware
8- ProsperOps
ProsperOps is an AWS cloud cost management tool that can manage discount instruments for FinOps teams and AWS resellers. It uses data-driven insights to establish granular visibility and automate cost optimization. But ProsperOps is strictly focused on cost optimization only, which can make it somewhat limited in terms of features. To get more cost reporting insights into your AWS account, you may have to use other tools alongside it.
Source: ProsperOps
How Can nOps Help You With AWS Cost Reporting?
Accurate cost reporting can only be helpful if you can drive accurate cost insights from it and optimize your AWS costs. nOps goes beyond AWS cost reporting and offers solutions to help you optimize and decrease AWS costs by over 50%.
With nOps, you can add cost allocation tags, identify mistagged or untagged resources, manage EC2/ RDS Reserved Instances, visualize cloud costs through detailed reports, and more.
nOps allows you to:
- Pay less for what you use
- Use less by automatically pausing idle resources
Let us help you save! Book a demo call for nOps today.
