Cost Reports

By default, Vantage provides you with a Cost Report, named All Resources, that will show you all costs across all your connected cloud service accounts. You can create as many Cost Reports as you’d like and filter your costs across several dimensions. As you create Cost Reports, they will be displayed on the Overview page. Each report will automatically generate a forecast.

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Create a Cost Report

You can perform additional filter and analysis operations on your Cost Report. See the following sections for additional instructions:

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Save a Cost Report

After you apply all desired filters to the report, you can save your changes and name the report.

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Organize Cost Reports

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Cost Report Folders

You can organize your Cost Reports in folders and separate them by team or group. See the Folders documentation for more information.

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Dashboards

Cost Reports can be displayed as a group on a dashboard. The dashboard has options to display all reports by the same date range. See the Dashboards documentation for more information.

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Anomalies, Forecasts, and Annotations

Cost Reports have several other features, including anomaly detection, forecasts, and annotations. See the linked documentation for more information about these features.

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Filter Cost Reports

On the Filters menu, click Select a provider and choose from any of your connected providers (AWS, Azure, etc.). Costs are filtered to all costs for the selected provider. Within the table, costs are grouped by provider service (e.g., Amazon Relational Database Service), in descending order of Accrued Costs. To view available filter options, click New Rule. A list of filter options is displayed (e.g., Account or Resource). Filter options vary per provider. Each filter includes options for exact matching and fuzzy matching. For example, in the image below, you can select is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, and ends with for the Resource filter. This set of options can vary per selected filter. Select a matching option, then select a filter value (e.g., where **Service** is **Amazon Relational Database Service** + **Amazon Elastic Cloud - Compute**) To continue filtering the report, perform any of the following actions:

• To add another value for that filter, click the + icon next to the first value.
• To remove a selected filter value, click the trashcan icon.
• To add more filter criteria, click New Rule. The graph is updated to display costs that match the first filter criteria and the second filter criteria.
• To add a separate filter set, click + Add a Filter. You can also use this option to add costs from another provider. The graph is updated to display costs that match the first filter set or the second filter set.
• To remove a filter set, click the three dots (…) on the top right of the filter set, then click Delete.

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Flexible Match

The flexible match operator in Vantage helps you work with inconsistent tag naming conventions. When filtering a Cost Report, you can select the flexible match operator to ignore differences in case, whitespace, underscores, and hyphens. This allows a single filter to match many tag value variations without creating multiple filters or manually normalizing tags. For example, your organization tags workloads by team, but the tag values vary: one service might use teamA, another team-a, and a third Team A. Instead of creating separate filters for each variant, use the flexible match operator as shown in the image below. Vantage automatically normalizes and matches all variations, as well as match any future iterations that are created of the Team A string. To exclude values, use the does not flexible match operator.

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Percent-Based Cost Allocation

With percent-based cost allocation, you can filter Cost Reports to show back shared resources, like support costs or multi-tenant databases, to the team or department that uses them. As filters are set in a Cost Report, Vantage will query for costs that meet all those conditions. To set percent-based cost allocation: When percent-based cost allocation is set as a filter, forecasts will be produced in aggregate for all set conditions, and the percentage allocation will be applied to that forecast.

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Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)-Managed Tags

If you want to view Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster tags, you need to enable ECS-Managed Tags. See the AWS documentation for more information.

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AWS Organization Tags

You can filter and group by AWS Organization Tags in Cost Reports. Create a filter for Tag. For the Tag Key, these tags are displayed like aws:organizations:tag.

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Network Costs

For resources that generate network traffic costs (e.g., NAT Gateways), a Network Costs button is displayed in the Cost Report list. See the Network Flow Reports documentation for details on network costs. In the below example, this Cost Report is grouped by Service and Resource. The Network Costs button is displayed next to NAT Gateway resources.

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Saved Filters

You can create and use Saved Filters to apply commonly used filters across multiple reports. Review the Saved Filters documentation for more information.

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Configure Report Groups

With the Group By option, you can select one or more dimensions to group by. If you select a grouping option, both the Cost Report table and graph will include costs aggregated by the selected groupings. Once the report is saved, the report’s corresponding Overview widget will be updated as well. You can group by the following dimensions:

• Account (e.g., member account on AWS, project on GCP)
• Billing Account
• Region
• Service (e.g., Amazon S3, Azure VMs)
• Resource
• Provider (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Category
• Subcategory
• Charge Type (see the section below for definitions)
• Tagged (e.g., see whether resources are or are not tagged)
• Tag (includes virtual tags)

After a Cost Report has been grouped, each grouping is displayed as a column in the table below the graph. On the graph itself, group labels are displayed with dashes between each grouping, such as production - Acme - nat-123456.

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Charge Type Grouping Category

The Charge Type grouping includes costs separated by items like usage, discounts, EDP discounts, and taxes. Expand the section below to view the associated providers and definitions for each charge type.

Click to view Charge Types

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Other Grouping Category

By default, the top five groups of costs by amount are displayed on the graph. In addition, the Other Costs category is displayed as an aggregation of all remaining costs. To add more costs to the graph and table, click the down arrow next to Other Costs. The number of other costs is displayed. Click Show X More Items, to add additional cost groups to the report.

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Drill Down in Costs Table

Within the table below the graph, you can drill down into your report to create precise filtering and grouping views. Your options to drill down in the report will vary based on if the report is ungrouped or has some grouping criteria applied to it.

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Drill Down in Ungrouped Report

When a report is ungrouped (i.e., the Group By dropdown is set to Ungrouped), a few icons are displayed within each line of the table, depending on your ingested resources.

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Category and Subcategory Cost Filters

Each service typically has multiple underlying category and subcategory costs. For example, you have AWS as a connected provider. You can filter by several subcategories, like the amount of storage you’ve used or the amount of egress traffic for retrieving S3 objects as well as for the actual HTTP requests you make to query for S3 objects.

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Per-Resource Cost Filters

For certain providers, like AWS, you can view individual resources. In the below example, two RDS instances are present in the account. The table displays how much each instance is driving in costs—without the need for any additional tagging. You can also view the Category and Subcategory costs on a per-resource basis. In the previous example, to view a breakdown of costs for the RDS instance named core-production-primary-01, click the Costs by Category icon (looks like a dollar sign—$). Costs are now displayed by resource, within a category, for a specific service.

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Drill Down in Grouped Report

If you apply grouping criteria to the Cost Report (e.g., set the Group By field to Service), another set of drilldown options is displayed on the Cost Report. In the below example:

• The report is filtered to AWS costs and grouped by Service.
• On the line item for Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute, click the Drilldown icon.
  • A filter for line items matching only the Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute service is added in the Filters menu.
  • In addition, the report is now also grouped by Category.
  • The Category column also now appears in the table.

• You can continue to click the Drilldown icon to add filters for selected line items and group by other options, like Subcategory. For example, if you click the Drilldown icon on the EC2 > Data Transfer line item:
  • The Data Transfer category filter is applied in the Filters menu.
  • A grouping of Subcategory is available.
  • Subcategory is also displayed as a column in the table.

• You can also click the Filter On list to the right of the Drilldown icon and select a specific grouping/filtering option. In the below example, you select the Region option for the EC2 > Data Transfer > EU-DataTransfer-Out-Bytes line item. In the resulting report, EC2 > Data Transfer > EU-DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is broken down with individual line items per region.
  • The additional filter for the EU-DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is added to the Filters menu.
  • The report is now also grouped by Region.
  • Region is now a column in the table.

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Tagging Drilldown

When a tag is a nested tag, you can drill down into its values to view all subtags. In the example below, the report is grouped by the nested tag Business Units. This tag contains two values—Core Production and Core Development—each made up of other tags. Click the drilldown tagging icon to the left of a tag name to reveal its nested values. For example, Core Production is the parent tag, with Business Unit Applications subtags app1 and app2. The Costs Report table then shows costs associated with these lower-level tags.

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Billing Code Descriptions

AWS practitioners who are having trouble understanding AWS billing codes present in Cost Reports can find descriptions of each billing code, other variations of that billing code, and other services that use the same billing code within Cost Reports. When you view any AWS Cost Report grouped by Provider, Service, Category, and Subcategory, you can hover over any subcategory line item and a tooltip with a link to cur.vantage.sh is provided that takes you to a page with details for that billing line item.

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Adjust Chart Visualization

You can adjust the chart to be displayed as either a bar chart, line chart, area chart, or pie chart. To toggle these options, click one of the corresponding buttons on the top right of the chart.

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Configure Report Settings

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Credits Discounts Refunds and Taxes

By default, all Cost Reports include discounts and taxes. You can optionally enable credits and discounts, too.

• Credits: Credits are often promotional codes redeemed for services or trials on your account.
• Discounts: Discounts can include programs like the AWS Enterprise Discount program. Discounts are often negotiated with the cloud provider and based on usage. You might see discounts reflected as negative values in the Cost Report table. You can follow the below best practices for analyzing Cost Reports with discounts:
  • If you remove the Discount setting, you can view usage and costs before the discount was applied.
  • Group or filter the Cost Report by Charge Type. This grouping displays costs separated by items like usage, discounts, EDP discounts, and taxes.
• Refunds: Any associated refunds.
• Taxes: Any associated taxes.

To configure these options:

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Amortization

By default, all Cost Reports show upfront fees, such as fees for Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Marketplace purchases, and Support, amortized day by day for the period of the fee. In addition, Vantage uses committed use attribution for linked accounts. By default, you will see fees for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans assigned to the AWS account that benefited from the discount—not the account that purchased the commitment. For more information about this logic, see the following Vantage blog post.

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Disabling Amortization

You can toggle a Cost Report to not amortize upfront fees if you want to view the upfront fees on the day they were incurred.

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Vantage vs. Cost Explorer

If you notice your costs in Vantage differ from what you see in Cost Explorer, this could be for many reasons, including:

• Amortization logic: As noted above, Vantage uses a different amortization logic from Cost Explorer.
  If you want to align the view in Vantage to Cost Explorer, disable amortization in Vantage and compare the numbers to unblended costs in Cost Explorer.
• EC2-Other: In Cost Explorer, this cost category comprises many subcategories (e.g., Data Transfer). In Vantage, EC2-Other is reallocated into direct line items. For example, if you filter for NAT gateway expenditures, the charges initially categorized under transit or egress in EC2-Other are assigned to the individual resource that created the charge.

For more tips on reviewing your cost data against Cost Explorer, see the following blog post.

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Usage-Based Reporting

Usage-Based Reporting provides infrastructure consumption in non-monetary metrics, such as virtual machine running hours, stored gigabytes of data, and read/write units consumed. These reports are available within Cost Reports, where you can toggle between viewing consumption by spend or by usage. See the Usage-Based Reporting documentation for details on how to use and view these reports.

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Comparative Cost Reporting

To compare costs day by day, week by week, month by month, or quarter by quarter on Cost Reports, click the By Date option above the cost table. A view of costs with the same date binning selected for the graph is displayed. To switch back to the previous, current, and percent change view, select Cumulative. When you view the By Date option, a Total Costs row is displayed at the top of the table.

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Export Cost Reports

You can select from two modes when you export a report: Basic or Advanced.

• With a Basic export, you can modify only the date range of a report.
  • If your Cost Report has an associated buisiness metric, you can choose whether you want to export your unit costs at the same time as your costs export. This export will be sent to you as a separate CSV.
• With an Advanced export, you have the same functionality as a Basic export, but you can also arbitrarily select the columns you want on the report, a date range, and a date bin. The columns can be any combination of groupings from the following list:
  • Provider (e.g., AWS, GCP, New Relic)
  • Service (e.g., EC2, EBS)
  • Region (e.g., us-east-1)
  • Service category (e.g., Storage, Compute)
  • Service subcategory (e.g., m5.large, StandardTier)
  • Charge Type (e.g., Usage)
  • Account (e.g., AWS member account, GCP project)
  • Billing Account (e.g., billing account name)
  • Resource ID (e.g., S3 bucket ARN, MongoDB Atlas cluster name)
  • Usage (toggle to export Usage-Based Reporting data)
• The Advanced export also has the option to select a specific Tag key. The Tag key will be included as an additional column in the export, in the following format: Tag:<TAG KEY> (e.g., Tag:Project).
• For the Schema option, select either Vantage’s default schema or the FinOps Foundation FOCUS schema.

When the export is finished generating, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the exported data, typically within a few minutes. An example export, with groupings of Service Category and Service Subcategory, is shown above. You can also export grouped Cost Reports and the groupings will be respected in the downloaded CSV.

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Starred by Me

If you want to save your favorite Cost Reports or folders to a convenient location, you can star specific resources.