How to implement an AWS Cloud Cost Monitor to reduce your AWS spend

AWS has made it easy for businesses to use the cloud and save money on their IT spending. However, as your business grows and your AWS usage increases, it can become difficult to keep track of your AWS spend and stay within your budget.

That's where implementing an AWS cloud cost monitor comes in! In this blog post, we will discuss how CloudOps can monitor your cloud costs and help reduce your AWS spend and keep your costs under control.

What is an AWS Cloud Cost Monitor and what are its benefits

A cloud cost monitor is a monitoring tool that provides AWS customers with visibility into their cloud cost breakdown. A good cost monitor enables customers to see how much they are spending on AWS products and services, as well as how their costs compare to other AWS configurations. An AWS cost monitor also provides customers with insights into how their AWS costs are trending over time. The benefits of AWS cloud cost monitoring include:

• The ability to see how much you are spending on AWS products and services
• The ability to see how your AWS costs compare to other AWS configurations
• The ability to see how your AWS costs are trending over time
• The ability to identify opportunities to optimize your AWS spend
• The ability to set budgets and track your progress against those budgets
• The ability to monitor your usage of AWS resources in real time
• The ability to see historic AWS usage and costs

How to set up an AWS cost-monitoring solution

The first step is deciding what your goals are for the cost monitoring that you are setting up. Most organisations do this once their AWS costs spiral out of control. However, it's important to implement monitoring for your AWS infrastructure, both utilisation metrics and also costs and spend against budget.

There are native AWS options for doing this namely:

• AWS Cost explorer - Allows you to visualise, understand and monitor your AWS costs and usage over time
• Amazon CloudWatch - Collects monitoring and operational data ain the form of logs, metrics and events to give a unified view of your AWS estate

Both of these tools do what they do very well, but there are some core limitations. Firstly they are both AWS native products so they don't look at anything other than your AWS infrastructure. If you are running cloud infrastructure in multiple public clouds this can be a drawback.

Also, both require a level of learning and then need implementation for your organisation. This can become a mini project in itself that has to be resourced and maintained. Finally, both give you a lot of data about what you are doing but they don't give you the real value of telling you what to change or making recommendations.

For these reasons we believe that IG CloudOps provides a complete cost-monitoring solution to help you manage your AWS costs. Implementing CloudOps is quite a streamlined process, once linked in CloudOps starts to collect data about your specific AWS workloads.

This is then processed and cost reduction recommendations linked to your workloads are generated.

How to use CloudOps to reduce your AWS spend

CloudOps provides AWS and Azure customers with a real-time, unified view of their AWS spend. CloudOps also offers recommendations on how to optimise your AWS spend. The AWS cost optimisation recommendations provided by CloudOps are based on best practices and years of experience in helping organisations reduce their AWS spend and reviewing hundreds of deployments over the years.

CloudOps also offers the ability to set AWS cost budgets. This enables you to track your progress against those budgets. You can also monitor your usage of AWS resources in real time and see historic AWS usage and costs. All of this information is presented in an easy to understand format that helps you make informed decisions about how to reduce your AWS spend.

In conclusion, CloudOps provides a complete AWS cost monitoring solution that helps you manage your AWS spend, provides recommendations on how to optimise your AWS spend and also enables you to set AWS cost budgets and track your progress against those budgets.

If you are looking for a comprehensive AWS cloud cost monitor, then CloudOps is the best solution for you.

Tips for reducing your AWS spend even further

We have written extensively about how to evaluate and reduce AWS spending month on month. But other things to think about are:

• How do you pay for your AWS tenant? Can you extend your payment terms and get cash back on a credit facility like American Express
• AWS support & consultancy - can you rationalise this if you implement CloudOps? Automating cloud management will heavily reduce the amount of support and advisory services you need - find out more about AWS support options available

If you want more tips about this topic then please read our full-length article on how to manage AWS cost optimisation and ensure you're getting value for money.

Or book a test drive and see how CloudOps can manage your cloud infrastructure.