Cost Reporting
💡 What Is Cost Reporting?
Cost Reports are one of the fundamental tools in Vantage. They provide complex reporting to slice and dice the data for many use cases. You can create numerous reports in Vantage and use filters, grouping parameters, and timeframe options to see the exact data you want to see. Cost Reports include a chart view and a cost table. You can manipulate the view to highlight certain data points and zoom in on particular dates or areas where you see anomalies.
💭 Why Should I Use Cost Reporting?
Cost Reports can help any user or stakeholder to view the exact costs they want to see across any cloud provider (e.g., AWS), a set of accounts, or even check on their current tagging schema. If you want to see a longitudinal view of your cost data and have the ability to filter by multiple parameters, then you can start with Cost Reports to get an overall picture of the state of your costs. Vantage provides you with Cost Reports and additional Cost Reporting tools, like:
- Cost Report forecasts
- Annotations
- Dashboards
- Vantage Issues
📝 Cost Reporting Use Cases
Cost Reports are helpful for any FinOps stakeholder—from engineering managers to organizational management.
- As an engineering manager, you may want to see why data transfer costs are increasing for storage resources. You can create a Cost Report with filters for AWS data transfer costs and view down to the resource level where you’re seeing the highest cost spikes. You use the Annotations and Vantage Issues feature to collaborate with other teams and understand changes in data transfer costs over time. You also create a dashboard to monitor team projects and present current costs over time to management.
- As a FinOps stakeholder, you may want to review your tagged resources and ensure teams are following tagging standards. You can create a report to check for untagged resources across one or more providers. Use this report to help you add missing tags or update existing tags.
- As an application owner, create a monthly overview of all costs related to your application. You can create a report that breaks down expenses by resource and cost category. Filter for resources with your application’s corresponding tag. Use the report to track spending trends and variations to understand the cost impact of application usage and changes over time. You set up Cost Report notifications to send you a monthly digest of specific reports so you can remember to go in and check where things are at each month.