A Gift for the Holidays: Farewell, EC2-Other

Today, Vantage announces the removal of "EC2-Other", an oftentimes confusing catch-all line-item for AWS customers that encompasses cost categories such as EBS Volumes, EC2 T instances burstable credits, NAT Gateways and Data Transfer fees. EC2-Other is the most ambiguous cost line item on an AWS bill and as of today, Vantage has delivered a better solution by providing specific resource-related cost categories that make sense.

Before, customers had a single line item provided by AWS Cost Explorer named "EC2-Other" that combined a number of unrelated resources. This category contained things like EBS Volumes, NAT Gateways, T-instance CPU Credits, unattached IP addresses, and data transfer costs. Although customers could previously drill down to cost subcategories within EC2-Other, forecasting costs was made more difficult per sub-service, ultimately obscured costs and confused customers. In some cases, the majority of a customer's bill could come from EC2-Other so the ambiguity of where costs were coming from made observability and planning difficult.

Now, Vantage customers who have enabled Per-Resource Costs will automatically have "EC2-Other" replaced with friendlier cost categories as follows:

• Elastic Block Storage: A cost line item for all EBS usage that includes volume charges, snapshot charges as well as provisioned IOPS costs.
• NAT Gateways: A line item for all NAT Gateway costs and associated data transfer from NAT Gateways.
• IP Addresses: A line item for all unattached IP address costs.
• T-instance CPU Credits will now be included in the existing EC2 Instances line item.
• Data Transfer: Data Transfer costs previously contained with EC2-Other will now be allocated to the resources driving them under EC2 and NAT Gateway cost categories.

Data Transfer: Data Transfer costs previously contained with EC2-Other will now be allocated to the resources driving them under EC2 and NAT Gateway cost categories.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Today, Vantage is launching the replacement of the AWS Cost Explorer provided cost category of "EC2-Other" in favor of simpler to understand cost categories of:

• Elastic Block Storage
• NAT Gateways
• IP Addresses
• Moving Data Transfer costs to the respective EC2 and NAT Gateway line items.
• Moving EC2 Burstable credits to the EC2 line Item.

This is being done to show customers costs that map more directly to their corresponding services and products used.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage customer who has Per-Resource Costs enabled.

3. How much does this cost?

This feature is provided at no additional cost and is bundled into existing tiers.

4. Why do I need to enable Per-Resource Costs to get access to this feature?

The way that Vantage provides this functionality is by ingesting and processing Cost and Usage Report files which is the pre-requisite for Per-Resource Costs. Once integrated, Vantage will automatically process the underlying line-item files to provide Per-Resource Costs functionality as well as remove EC2-Other in favor of more understandable cost categories.

5. What is Per-Resource Costs?

Per-Resource Costs is a feature launched by Vantage in September of 2021 that provides deeper cost analytics than AWS Cost Explorer and gives customers a resource-centric view of their AWS costs. More information can be found on the Per-Resource Costs blog post here: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-advanced-analytics

6. I am using Per-Resource Costs but prefer to maintain the “EC2-Other” category because me or counterparts at my company still rely on it in some capacity. Can I maintain “EC2-Other” rather than have this new set of functionality.

No.

7. Is there API support for this feature under Cost Report API calls?

Yes. In the event that you query the Vantage Cost Report API, you will see EC2-Other removed as a cost category and the new cost categories will be present. API documentation can be found here: https://vantage.readme.io/reference/getcosts

8. What were the cost categories that were part of “EC2-Other” before and where can I find those costs now?

Below is a mapping of the costs encompassed under EC2-Other and where they will be present now:

• All EBS Volume related costs will now have a dedicated line item of "EBS" that includes EBS Volume charges, provisioned IOPS charges as well as EBS snapshot charges.
• NAT Gateways will now have a dedicated line item of "NAT Gateways"
• T-instance burstable credits will now be included under the existing line item of "EC2 Instances"
• Transit and data transfer costs will now be assigned to the resources driving them and be contained within "EC2" and "NAT Gateway" line items accordingly.
• All costs related to IP addresses will now have a dedicated line item of "IP Addresses"

9. When applicable, will Per-Resource Costs give me accrued cost per AWS resource for these various new dedicated cost categories.

Yes. EBS Volumes, IP Addresses and NAT Gateways will now show all respective active resources and their corresponding accrued costs. This gives you the ability to see day-by-day accrued costs by category and subcategory for each of these resource categories.

10. Will “EC2 Other” be replaced in my existing Cost Reports?

Yes, there is nothing you need to do to have this applied to your existing Cost Reports. At the time of this blog post all of your previous cost reports will be updated assuming that you have enabled Per-Resource Costs.