Today, Vantage has launched support for viewing AWS service cost subcategories for all AWS services. Vantage users may now see cost subcategories for each AWS service on the accrued cost views of their Vantage console. Additionally, Vantage has gone through hundreds of obscure AWS billing codes to add plain English descriptions of what these costs are to simplify your understanding of where your costs are coming from. This is available to all Vantage users who have a connected AWS account without any changes needed on their part.
Before, Vantage was showing only aggregate accrued services costs (S3, EC2, RDS, etc.) and point-in-time run-rates of active resources. This was helpful for understanding what active resources you currently have and how they were contributing to costs but depending on your infrastructure, made understanding costs of each underlying AWS service difficult to see.
An example of Vantage cost subcategories for RDS. You'll see a full breakdown of cost subcategories, plain English descriptions, billing codes, and resources contributing to these costs.
Now, customers can see 100% of their costs not only in aggregate for each service but also on a more granular level by cost subcategory. For example, instead of just seeing the AWS cost category of "EC2-Other" and how it is trending per day, you can now drill down to see how much that is coming from idle IP addresses, EBS volume usage, EBS provisioned IOPS, NAT Gateway usage, and traffic that transits through NAT Gateways. Additionally, Vantage will show you resources contributing to these costs on a per-service basis.
To get started with analyzing your service cost subcategories, login to the Vantage console and head to the accrued costs view.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are AWS cost subcategories?
AWS services sometimes have multiple ways in which they charge you. For example, S3 will charge you for storage of objects, egress of retrieval of these objects, as well as the HTTP requests you use to access your objects. AWS bills you on a separate cost subcategory for each of these. Now Vantage can not only answer the question of "How much is S3 costing me?" but also can answer "Which S3 subcategories are costing me the most and how are they trending?".
How are cost subcategories and values determined?
Vantage securely connects with your AWS account and connects with various service and billing APIs to retrieve this data. The values listed are based off of actual usage data from your AWS account and are not estimates.
What AWS services does Vantage support for cost subcategories?
Vantage has coverage for 100% of AWS services for both accrued and subcategories costs, inclusive of costs like egress, lambda, intra-region transit costs, and request costs.
Do I need to subscribe to Vantage to get access to this data?
This feature is available to all Vantage tiers (including free tiers) and you only need to upgrade your account if you exceed limits listed on our pricing page.
Is this feature dependent upon me using a certain workflow for provisioning my infrastructure?
No. Vantage will capture 100% of your AWS costs agnostic of how you provision your infrastructure.
