Vantage Launches Advanced Analytics: See the Cost of Individual AWS Resources

https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-advanced-analytics

by chriseppstein • 5 years ago

21 10 5 years ago

smurda• 5 years ago

Why is cost transparency so challenging for the CSPs? Is it planned obfuscation, or is it just that dedicating engineering time to billing isn't as interesting as building more impactful products?

jonoberg• 5 years ago

I think the problem is two fold.

1) a CSP can't make money off of cost tools and anything that doesn't generate revenue will always be de-prioritized. You could make an argument that having good cost tooling natively will prevent churn (which is probably true) but still this only retains revenue that other products generate rather than generate new revenue itself. I don't think there is a world where customers wouldn't be enraged if AWS started charging for Cost Explorer even if it meant a better version of CE.

2) All of the product teams that generate the cost data are not incentivized to make the cost data easy to understand or sensible from a billing perspective. They are incentivized to generate more revenue. It feels as if AWS billing is meant to be easy for the product teams to bill based on rather than for the customer to grok the bill.

CSDude4• 5 years ago

Not to challenge it, but how does it differ from Cost Explorer in AWS?

StratusBen4• 5 years ago

Cost Explorer does not give per resource cost analytics outside of EC2. So you are unable to see specific resource costs in AWS Cost Explorer without making a very, very large investment in tagging each specific resource with something different.

Vantage Advanced Analytics will now show all customers not only total accrued costs per AWS resource but give you day-by-day trends broken down by editorialized category (i.e. Data Transfer) as well as specific AWS billing-code subcategory ("i.e. EU Egress Charges"). Additionally Vantage will show cost trends for each resource so you can plot month-over-month how specific resources like S3 Buckets or SQS Queues are trending in cost.

AWS Cost Explorer does not show any of this information.

CSDude4• 5 years ago

Tagging is required yes, but its a very simple practice. I worked in both small (3 accounts) and huge (200 accounts) orgs, and tagging, at least by name was never a problem regardless of tens of thousands of resources we manage.

Cost Explorer does all of what you mentioned. UI allows 1 level group by, API does 2. You can filter & group by API Operation (S3 put object), Service (S3), Usage Type (S3 Standard Storage GB/mo), (predefined) Tags and it works brilliantly over even 1 year of data, fast.

I'm really not convinced on what you can do additionally, since you work on the same data exactly (detailed dumps on S3) apart from nicer charts.

StratusBen4• 5 years ago

[Disclosure] My name is Ben Schaechter and I'm Co-Founder and CEO at https://www.vantage.sh/ - before Vantage I worked at both AWS and DigitalOcean in a technical product management capacity.

Advanced Analytics is our biggest feature update since the initial launch of Vantage and gives you the ability to see costs for each individual AWS resource broken down day-by-day by category (i.e. Data Transfer) as well as subcategory ("i.e. EU Egress Charges"). So imagine seeing the cost of pretty much any resource including things like S3 Buckets, Lambda Functions, SQS Queues, SNS Topics and doesn't require any tags/changes to your infrastructure.

We believe this provides a richer set of analytics than AWS Cost Explorer provides. I'd be happy to answer any questions if folks have them - our original launch happened on HackerNews and we got a great set of questions.

Vantage Launches Advanced Analytics: See the Cost of Individual AWS Resources

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