Tag Archives: usage

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.

Start tracking your AWS cloud costs with CloudVertical

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One of CloudVertical’s main goals is helping Amazon Web Services (AWS) users to get better control over their cloud usage and cost. We provide users with powerful tools that let them always stay on top of cloud spend and usage.

Lets take a look at the tools and then see how easy it is to setup a CloudVertical account and get it synced with your Amazon Web Services account.

 Cloud Dashboards for real-time monitoring

Dashboards are the best way to see high level overview of your current cloud spend and usage anytime you want. What is really important and unique to our dashboards is that they provide you with near real-time information, so whenever you log in, you can check your costs and usage in this particular moment of time (and – if you want – compare it with historical data from the last 24 hours to 30 days).

Every dashboard is formed with a set of widgets that represent specific data: current (month to date) Amazon cloud costs and their breakdown by service for the entire account, a list of all your EC2 instances with their statuses, monthly costs and running time, network usage, EBS and S3 usage with costs… and much more.

 AWS Cost and Usage Weekly Reports

For some users checking dashboards daily to get updated on their cloud cost and usage is not the most convenient solution. That’s why we created the AWS Cost and Usage Weekly Reports delivered conveniently right to their mailboxes once a week.

Email reports provide you with weekly summary of Amazon Web Services costs and usage, so you know what is going on with your cloud on a weekly basis. They also include some graphs to help you spot trends.

If you find some data in email report particularly interesting, you can log in to your account and under “Reports” tab you can access more detailed interactive version of that report.

Start Now! (its free)

For starters, get yourself CloudVertical Basic Account, it’s free (as in beer). Simply go to https://cloudvertical.com/signup/basic, use your email and pick a password.

Next, you will be prompted to select which cloud services and tools you are using. We’ll cover them all in future blog posts, right now we’re interested in just Amazon Web Services.

Congratulations, you’ve got yourself CloudVertical account. You can see, that you got some dashboards, addons and reports prepared for you, but you need to activate them to actually be able to use. This means you need to actually connect it with your AWS cloud account. Lets do it now.

Click any of “Activate” buttons and you will be taken to the form, which will ask you for AWS credentials. We need following data from you:

Account name – pick any name you want, that you wish to identify this particular AWS account in our system (this will be very helpful when you decide to connect more than one account).

AWS Email and Password – we need this data for our application to access to your account and analyse your billing info. We are aware that many people have issues with sharing those information, so your AWS integration will work even if you leave these fields blank, but some widgets require more granular access to populate (side note: you could create a consolidated billing profile with no access keys if you wish). We encourage full integration, because it allows us to provide you with most value-add, but we don’t force it.

Access Key ID and Secret Key – these might be tricky to get, so here is little help. First, you have to log into our AWS account (http://aws.amazon.com) and go to “Security Credentials” section.

 

You’ll find your Access Keys down in the middle of page, in a dedicated box. To show “Secret Key” you need to click additional link. Copy those keys and paste them in our form.

That’s it! You’re set up and ready to start tracking your AWS cloud costs and performance with CloudVertical. Now you just need to give us some time to gather data (as you’ve just connected your account to our app, we don’t have much data yet to work on. With every passing hour we will have more data to work on and will be able to give you more detailed and accurate insights.

As usual, if you have any questions, issues, requests, feedback or want to chat – we’re here for you. You can contact us on Twitter: @cloudvertical or via email: support@cloudvertical.com