Tag Archives: reporting

Announcing the Heroku Cost Control Add-on

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Attention Heroku users! You can now track your Dyno, Worker, Database and Addons costs with the CloudVertical add-on.

The add-on offers tool for tracking, reporting and analyzing your Heroku costs. Inspectors provide a better insight into actual performance and costs, you’ll automatically get regular emails report, and you can also create custom reports and alerts.

The installation process is simple, you can do it in two ways:
- using the Heroku add-ons market (you can find our add-on here)
- using the Heroku client (CLI)

Our documentation might offer you some help, if you need it: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cloudvertical

Once setup, we’ll start monitoring your Heroku processes, databases and other add-ons, which you can see in the CloudVertical dashboard. Here’s a sample dashboard:

And here’s an example report:

Here’s some more into on specific features:

Main Chart

The CloudVertical add-on lets you monitor and track the costs of all processes and databases used by an application, in specified time period.

Key Cost Metrics

The Key Cost Metrics boxes show current total cost, cost for web and worker processes, and projected cost for the end of month. To give you additional insight, all costs are also presented with the percent change to previous analogical period. Cool eh?!

Key Usage Metrics

The Key Usage Metrics boxes show average web and worker processes number in specified period of time:

Databases

This section shows the list of databases connected to your app with cost (prorated to the second) based on applicable monthly fee.

Addons

This section shows the list of addons connected to your app with cost (prorated to the second) based on applicable monthly fee.

We’re still working on extending Heroku add-on functionalities, so please let us know if you have any feature requests or feedback!
Also If you need help in installation process, please send email to support@cloudvertical.com.

Detailed S3 analytics now available!

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We’ve heard many times from our customers that S3 cost is a big part of their bill, especially requests and transfer, and there is no way to find out how it’s broken down to buckets. Now we’ve got it covered!

As you may know there is an option to enable logging for a bucket (more about it here), where Amazon logs all your get/put/post etc. transactions. Based on these logs now we are able to give you updates on daily basis how many requests were made for each bucket and how much it cost you. Same for related data transfer.

To enable this feature in our app, you have to select check box at the cloud connection settings – screen below:

Within 24 hours we would start collecting data from logs and you would see something like this in usage section for s3 buckets:

Just make sure you’ve got logging enabled for buckets you care about! We can enable logging for you – but credentials you give us while connecting AWS must have be granted with write permissions to S3 . We would go through all your buckets and enable logging. If you store data in few regions we will create one bucket for each region which we’ll use as a logging target bucket.

That’s about it. Stay tuned for upcoming S3 custom reports!

Here’s a summary of what you get right now:

- Buckets list
- Number of GET requests and how much they cost you, per bucket and selected timeframe
- Number of PUT/POST/COPY/LIST requests and cost, per bucket and selected timeframe
- Data transfer and cost per bucket and selected timeframe

Please let us know if you have any feature requests or feedback!

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 Cloud Cost and Usage Reporting

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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.