Last week was quite busy for us, as we were preparing to launch new feature – interactive AWS cost and usage reports. Well, it’s not totally new, as our users were getting Amazon’s cloud costs and usage reports weekly on their mailboxes, but these new in-app reports take it to whole new level! Lets take a look.
AWS Cost and Usage Weekly Reports
Every user that has connected their Amazon Web Services with CloudVertical account is receiving weekly Cost and Usage reports on their mailbox at the beginning of every week. Reports cover basic figures, trends, numbers and graphs that give you high level overview of your cloud performance. This is our way of keeping our users always on top of their cloud spend and usage, without bothering them to login to our app and explore all the data on their own.
We’ve received a lot of great feedback on those reports. Still, some users wanted to dig a bit deeper in their report data and be able to compare cost and usage from different weeks. Responding to this demand, we expanded “Reports” section of our app to not only let users turn reports on and off, but to give them access to reports archive and ability to interact with data used to generate report.
Interactive Reports
Under “Reports” tab every user that has connected their Amazon cloud account with CloudVertical can see their reports list. Right now CloudVertical offers two types of reports: AWS Cost Report and AWS Usage report. On that list you can turn reports on and off (if for whatever the reason, you don’t want to get weekly report on your mailbox). But now you can also expand the list to view reports archive. Of course – if you have just signed up and we’ve just started processing your data, reports won’t be available to you just yet, as we won’t have enough data to create them.
From here you’ll be able to view your reports in details. Just click “View” to move into interactive report view. First thing you’ll notice is beautiful interactive graph representing how amount of running instances, average cost per instance and CPU utilization were changing in time. You can zoom and scroll graph to see more detailed data for specific period.
Below you’ll see data that you got in your AWS usage report sections: key figures on EC2 Instances, EBS volumes and Network usage and cost. But there is one more thing: by clicking “Show Details” button you can expand those sections to see much more detailed information that was used to calculate summary values (and more!).
As mentioned above, that’s just a first iteration of CloudVertical’s Interactive Reports feature. There’s still much to do in that area and our dev team is busy working on improvements. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you – here in comments, on Twitter or via email.
