Cost Reports

The Cloud Cost Optimizer provides comprehensive cost reports, offering valuable insights into your AWS costs. Cost reports are an essential tool to monitor and analyze your cloud spending, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for cost optimization.

How can you receive cloud cost reports?

No matter your pricing plan, you'll gain access to detailed monthly or weekly cloud cost reports, by deploying on your AWS account with Microtica.

The default setup is that your whole team on the project will receive a weekly report of the cloud costs on the connected AWS account.

Configuring Cloud Reports

To change the default setup and configure the cloud report, navigate to your Project Settings --> Cost Report from the left panel.

Here you can specify:

• Cloud report name
• Which AWS account and region you'd like to receive the report for
• Customize the report frequency: weekly or monthly cloud reports
• Who will receive the reports via email

Cloud cost report email

The Cloud Cost Optimizer generates weekly and monthly reports, giving you a detailed breakdown of your AWS costs over different intervals.

Each report includes a range of cost metrics, such as:

• current month-to-date cost,
• estimated cost for the month,
• cost by AWS account,
• estimated savings for the month (based on the active saving schedules)

Waste advisor

The report contains a section for Waste Advisor to drive significant cost savings by offering insights into resources that are underutilized, idle, or no longer needed.

1. Low Utilization EC2 Instances: Waste Advisor meticulously analyzes your EC2 instances to pinpoint those with low utilization. These instances often contribute to unnecessary costs. By identifying such instances, Waste Advisor empowers you to make informed decisions—either by resizing, consolidating, or terminating underutilized instances—to optimize your infrastructure and reduce expenses.
2. Idle Load Balancers: Idle load balancers are potential sources of waste, incurring costs without actively serving traffic. Waste Advisor flags these idle load balancers, enabling you to take action, either by modifying traffic distribution or terminating them, to eliminate redundant expenses.
3. RDS Idle DB Instances: Waste Advisor extends its capabilities to Amazon RDS instances. It highlights idle or underutilized database instances, helping you make choices about rightsizing, consolidating, or decommissioning, which can lead to significant cost reductions.

Taking Action for Cost Savings:

Once Waste Advisor identifies potential waste, it provides actionable recommendations that align with best practices for AWS cost optimization. By following these recommendations, you can:

• Rightsize Resources: Optimize resource allocation by selecting the appropriate instance types based on workload requirements, thus eliminating over-provisioning.
• Remove Idle Resources: Terminate or consolidate idle resources that contribute no value to your operations, effectively reducing unnecessary expenses.

Recently Provisioned Resources

The Recently Provisioned Resources section in the cost reports email is a valuable feature that provides insights into new resources provisioned within your AWS environment. By understanding what resources have been provisioned recently, you can proactively assess their impact on your AWS costs and initiate any necessary optimization actions.

Key Information Provided:

This section presents essential details about each recently provisioned resource, including:

• Resource Type: The type of resource that has been provisioned, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, etc.
• Resource Identifier: A unique identifier for the resource, aiding in tracking and management.
• Resource name: The name of the resource that was provisioned, so you can find it easily in the Microtica platform.
• Associated Tags: Any tags associated with the resource, assisting in categorization and organization.

Taking Action:

Upon reviewing the recently provisioned resources, you can take steps to optimize your AWS costs. This may involve analyzing the utilization and necessity of each resource, applying appropriate tags, and making decisions on resizing, terminating, or consolidating resources as needed.

Remember, interpreting cloud reports is an ongoing process. Regularly review your reports, compare trends across different timeframes, and adjust your optimization strategies accordingly.