Tag Archives: analytics

Focus on cloud cost and usage analytics

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CloudVertical started as cloud dashboard, offering users hight level overview of their cloud infrastructure. In last few months however, it became apparent that for most of us – this is not enough. Being able to see all the cloud services data in one place is a nice thing, but what really matters is – what you can do with it, once it is presented to you. This is where dashboard concept fell short. And this is why we are shifting our focus to analytics.

Our current focus is to provide our users with actionable and contextual information that will help them to manage their cloud more efficiently. This led to many changes in our app and mail reports, some of which went live last week, some are in beta, and some are still being designed and developed. We are very excited about this new approach and hope that you’ll like changes in CloudVertical app as much as we do.

So, whats new?

Cloud Overview

“Cloud Overview” is new main view that users see whenever they log in. It highlights most important cost and usage data of your cloud. At the top we show you cloud cost graph  in perspective of last six months so you can see context of your whole cloud spendings and spot trends. Below you’ll find information on current month-to-date cost, predicted end-of-month total cost and how these changed since last month.

In “Usage” section we highlight few usage metrics in form of key values and spark lines, to allow you quickly see how many and what type of resources you’re currently using and what is the usage trend. At the moment set those metrics is predefined by us, but we’re working on the moment on more flexible solution that will allow you choose your own set.

Finally, there is events stream that presents most recent cost and usage related events, alerts and recommendations. To sum up, “Cloud Overview” is the best way to quickly get informed on your clouds current cost and usage key metric and most recent events. From here, one can dig deeper into Cloud Cost Analtics and Cloud Usage Analytics to see more detailed reports on his cloud cost and usage.

Cloud Cost Analytics

This view is accessible to AWS users only at the moment. It allows users to analyze their cloud costs in time (last 1 – 12 months or any given custom time range) and break it down by services and regions. The data is presented on beautiful interactive graph and in tables below.

Cloud Usage Analytics

This one may be familiar to you, as it is based on Interactive Report on usage, that we introduced few weeks ago and described in detail in this release blogpost.

Cloud Cost and Usage Weekly Report

Remember AWS Weekly Cost Report and AWS Weekly Usage Report that we were sending you for the past few months? Now they are merged into one AWS Weekly Cost and Usage Report, to highlight only most important data in more informative way. Plus as many of our users requested, from now on cost data in report is displayed for current month to date of sending report (not last week only, as it used to be) and usage metrics are displayed with sparkling to show their dynamic.

Back to you

We’re working on extending and introducing new features: events, alerts, efficiency analytics, recommendations adding support for more cloud providers and more. But as always, we look for your feedback. Do you like this new direction we’re taking? Do you find it more useful? Is there something you particularly like or maybe something you miss and would love to see implemented?

AWS Credentials access levels

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We understand that security is a concern when granting access to your AWS accounts. So we wanted to explain what we do with the credentials you provide, and also how to improve your security.There is 2 levels of access we can be granted by a user, below I’ll explain what that means and which level gives you better value.

If you want to get fully featured analytics for your AWS bill and usage, we would ask you to provide an email and password to your main Amazon account and AWS IAM read only access credentials. Email and password will give us access to your billing statements – we will import and within a few minutes and you will be able to see the trends, cost per service/region over time – it’s really powerful! (See below – you get this almost instantly)

AWS Bill analytics

If you provide IAM read only credentials as well, we will start collecting all possible data from AWS and give you more detailed informations almost in real time about usage and cost, for example ‘instance cost : month to date’ as well as average usage. By collecting all AWS events, we can provide a really deep insight into your Cloud performance and cost.

Going forward we will be able to present you with analysis and recommendations, on how to optimize cost and usage so you’ll be able to run your Cloud much more efficiently.

If providing your AWS account email and password is a barrier, we understand that and we also provide AWS IAM only integration. You can give us just read only access to all your AWS services and we will be able to show you estimated cost and full usage information. The difference between full integration is that we would not be able to give you cost analytics from day one, we would need to gather data for at least a week before we will be able to show contextual and actionable data, where with full integration you get it almost instantly.

Here is quick walk through how you can generate IAM read only credentials.
Firstly login to the AWS management console and go to the IAM tab

now when you are in go to the users section on the left and once you are there you click on create user button you’ll get something like this:


let’s create user for example CloudVertical and you should see something like this

click on download credentials – you will need it to integrate with CloudVertical, now we need to set read only permissions. On users list select user you’ve just created at the bottom you will get something like this:


click on the ‘permissions’ tab there and click on ‘attach user polic’y you will get this popup:


select the third option from the top “Read Only Access” and in next step apply policy:


and you are done with AWS console, now open the file you’ve downloaded on account creation you will see there User name, Access Key ID and Secret Access Key – that’s exactly you need to activate your AWS data at CloudVertical.
If you have any questions or you need help integrating AWS please contact me directly @dominikmagon or send an email to support@cloudvertical.com.

Teaser: We’ll be launching an open source gateway soon that you can run on your own instance – and it sends all the data to us, but we never see your access – it’s totally secure, and open-source so you can even inspect the code! If you want early access to this – email beta@cloudvertical.com