AWS cost monitoring tools enable you to track your resource consumption and costs associated with running operations on the AWS platform. These tools vary in capabilities but typically offer customizable reporting, dashboarding, data analytics, built-in automation, and cost alerting.
Keep in mind that AWS monitoring differs from AWS management in that monitoring provides usage and cost data without necessarily offering optimization tools. In contrast, management comprises the actions you take based on the data.
Fortunately, most modern AWS cost monitoring software allows you to do both on one platform
However, different tools do not offer equal capabilities. Here are 10 of the best AWS usage and cost monitoring tools available today.
1. CloudZero
CloudZero offers a unique way to view, understand, and control your AWS costs continuously. In addition to your tagged resources, the platform’s AI-powered engine identifies, collects, and analyzes cost indicators from your entire AWS environment and applications.
This approach provides complete and accurate AWS usage and cost insight even if you have messy cost allocation tags.
Rather than only monitoring your total AWS usage at any given time, CloudZero Dimensions also enables you to connect resource costs and usage with the people, products, and processes that produce them.
This approach lets you slice and dice costs to hourly granularity by:
- Cost per customer so you can assess and protect your margins per customer
- Cost per product feature to determine how much to price your features to remain profitable — or ways your engineering team can rearchitect your software to make a given feature more profitable
- Cost per development team so that you can benchmark and improve your workflows
- Cost per project so you can see how much it costs to launch specific projects over time, including migration with AWS’ Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).
With CloudZero’s real-time cloud cost anomaly detection, you’ll also receive alerts on trending costs, suspicious spikes, or unplanned workloads directly to your Slack or email account so that you avoid going over budget.
Using CloudZero Budgets, you can also continuously set custom budget limits and track resource consumption and costs.
Whenever you are likely to exceed or you do exceed your set budget, the cost anomaly feature alerts you right away.
2. Native AWS Cost Monitoring Tools
AWS offers a wide range of monitoring tools that support data analytics, automation, and alerting. They include:
- AWS Billing and Cost Management console to view and manage your AWS costs. You can use a Master Account to combine AWS billing accounts, tag costs to users, and monitor cost trends across multiple accounts.
- AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a downloadable report of your AWS billing and consumption insights across all accounts. Data is available hourly, daily, and monthly, with filters for operations type, product code, and usage. You can do so at the account or organizational levels with CUR.
- Amazon Trusted Advisor continuously analyzes your AWS environment and makes recommendations on cost efficiency, security, application performance, and more.
- AWS Cost Explorer provides one place to visualize usage and related costs across all your AWS accounts. It can reveal trends, detect usage and cost spikes, and, through its API, feed cost and usage data from the past 13 months to your existing analytics tools.
- AWS Cost Categories offer a continuous way to view, organize, and understand your AWS cost and usage in the most meaningful way to your organization.
- AWS Budgets empowers you to set a custom budget and monitor your resource consumption and costs against that budget over time. This happens continuously, and you will get alerts when your Reserved Instances or Savings Plans dip or when your usage exceeds (or is projected to exceed) your set threshold.
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection continuously monitors your usage and costs to detect any cost spikes that could cause budget overruns. It then sends you Amazon SNS emails to alert you to the problem before you overspend.
- AWS Application Cost Profiler tracks and monitors the costs of the resources that your tenants share. You can track tenant costs hourly or daily.
AWS customers can take advantage of many of these for free, while others require a fee. AWS native cost monitoring tools are best if you only run a few workloads on AWS. As you scale, you may find them inexact or lacking the granularity you need to understand who, what, and why your AWS costs and usage are rising.
3. Komiser
Komiser provides cloud monitoring, analytics, and optimization services. Komiser Community Edition is a free and open-source version that offers cost forecasts and basic cost optimization recommendations for AWS, GCP, Azure, and Digital Ocean.
Komiser Enterprise offers more AWS cost monitoring benefits, including support for multiple accounts and users, cost breakdowns, and custom recommendations. It also monitors your AWS environment for abnormal behavior and alerts you so you can intervene in time to prevent cost overruns.
4. Xosphere
When Spot Instances are reasonably priced, Xosphere Instance Orchestrator actively replaces On-Demand Instances with them. It uses continuous monitoring and custom bidding rules to achieve this dynamically and in a timely manner.
If AWS Spot Instances become insufficient or uneconomical, Xosphere automatically switches your system back to On-Demand Instances just in time to avoid performance degradation, availability issues, or unexpected costs. Xosphere also supports containers.
5. ProsperOps
Using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, ProsperOps finds the most cost-effective way to use AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. This happens automatically and continuously to help you integrate AWS cost awareness into your engineering culture.
Instead of charging a percentage of your spending, ProsperOps charges only on savings, meaning it pays for itself. The charges are $0.05 per dollar saved on compute and $0.35 per dollar saved on optimized or purchased convertible reserved instances.
6. TotalCloud
The TotalCloud platform helps you see your AWS cloud resource consumption and costs at scale. The Cost Insights feature automatically analyzes purchase reports, consumption reports, and cost predictions. With TotalCloud’s usage-based scheduling, you can automatically end resources based on their idleness.
The tool can also help you find right-sizing opportunities and reduce costs by cleaning up unnecessary data. You get access to insights from multiple accounts in one place as well.
7. Flexera
Flexera offers full visibility into AWS expenditures by ingesting cost data in any currency. It enables automated cost allocation using tags found in billing data, enabling organizations to understand spending by business units and outcomes. This structured allocation supports accurate budgeting and forecasting.
Flexera offers over 90 out-of-the-box policies to automate cost-saving measures across hybrid cloud environments. These aid in anomaly detection and budget adherence.
8. Ascending
Ascending is a continuous monitoring and automated analysis tool for monitoring and analyzing Reserved Instance usage. You can also use it to find and apply the right-fit RIs for your workload.
It uses ongoing RI management and dynamically monitors your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ElastiCache, and Relational Database Service (RDS) usage. It also generates usage and cost charts, performs COGS analysis, and enables chargeback via resource tagging.
9. CloudCheckr By Spot.io
NetApp’s Spot provides CloudCheckr for analyzing real-time and historical data from across your AWS accounts and workloads to identify usage and cost patterns, trends, and anomalies. Its analytics tool identifies, quantifies, and recommends optimization recommendations for a given situation.
CloudCheckr recommends using tried-and-true methods, such as rightsizing and volume buying. You decide whether to implement those recommendations. If you do, you can automate the process in the future to monitor and optimize your system without too much involvement.
10. Cisco AppDynamics
Cisco AppDynamics uses Cloud Collectors to collect real-time data from AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and S3. These collectors pull AWS CloudWatch data every five minutes, keeping cost and performance tracking up to date. The platform then links this data with application performance, providing a full view of both resource efficiency and spending.
Understand Your AWS Costs In The Cost Dimensions You Care About
These AWS cost monitoring tools help you visualize and monitor the resources you use and the money you spend on them. But seeing who, what, and why your cloud spend changes is beyond most cost monitoring software.
Perhaps you:
- Can’t figure out if you are providing the service levels your customers want.
- Struggle to link the business impact of an AWS issue, from performance issues to cost spikes.
- Find that it takes your people days or even weeks to discover price spikes on AWS, making it challenging to control overspending.
- Are tired of juggling several AWS cost management tools to monitor everything from migration readiness to cloud costs.
If any of these sound familiar to you, CloudZero’s cloud cost intelligence platform can help. You can track AWS resource usage and associated costs by the hour, according to the exact team, product feature, project, or customer that incurred them.
CloudZero cost insights are based on telemetry, so you won’t need perfect tags to get accurate cost insights you can rely on for cost allocation and forecasting in AWS.
to see the power of CloudZero for yourself.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
