eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by AWSBillingTest

AWS Billing and Cost Management is the service that you use to pay your AWS bill, monitor your usage, and budget your costs.

When budgeting costs, this service also provides forecasts of your estimated costs. Using the AWS Billing test you can configure thresholds for this estimate for each service you subscribe to and also for a roll-up of estimated charges of all services. The test will then proactively alert you if the estimate is about to exceed your budget, and thus enable you to initiate measures for avoiding cost overruns.

Note:

  • This test reports billing metrics using Amazon CloudWatch. If billing alerts/metrics are not published to Amazon CloudWatch, then this test will not run. This is why, before attempting to run this test, you need to make sure that CloudWatch is configured to receive billing alerts. The steps to be followed for achieving this are detailed in Enabling CloudWatch to Receive Billing Alerts.

  • The metrics of this test can be viewed for the ‘us-east’ region only. However, since this region stores Amazon CloudWatch metrics for worldwide estimated charges, the Estimated charges that this region reports for a service will be the consolidated charges for all regions that are using that particular service.

Output of the test: One set of results for each service subscribed in each AWS region

First-level descriptor: AWS Region

Second-level descriptor: ServiceName

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Estimate_charges Indicates the estimated cost of this service across all regions that are using that service. USD Compare the value of this measure across services to know which service you will be spending the most on in the future.

You can be notified if cost estimations for a service exceed an acceptable limit, by configuring such a limit as a the maximum threshold for this measure for that service. Based on these alarms, you can set out to change how frequently you actually use that service, so as to reduce related overheads.

For the Total descriptor, this measure will report the total estimated charges across all services.