What you will get:
- You will know what cost metric to use with each persona.
- A dashboard for your finance team.
- A dashboard for your accounting team.
- Set default metrics for each persona.
- Show the correct savings thanks to your work using reservations / savings plans.
Prerequisites:
- You know how to split your bill between Production and R&D costs.
- You choose a metric to follow your product usage: daily active users, total number of customers, total revenue…
- You choose a metric to follow your R&D costs: total number of engineers, time spend on the CI per repository…
Steps:
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Step 1: Understand each persona and what they need to know:
- Tech team: cost based on usage or amortized costs: they should not see credits, savings plans, reservations. Except if savings plan —> see caveats here. daily granularity or hourly
- Accounting team: Amortized costs: because it should take into account amortization of upfront costs in case of AWS. daily / hourly granularity.
- Finance team: billed cost: how much money will be paid every month. High granularity months.
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Step 2: What to do with reservations / savings plans ?
If you have a global savings plan over all your accounts, the saving plan can move and be assigned to different accounts over time: this creates fake variations of costs just because the savings plan is assigned to different accounts over time.
Contracted costs is the cost without the savings plan but with your EDP, this metric will be stable against savings plan.
To protect against savings plan sub usage or over usage of the savings plan you can create an alert.
- to show cost metrics per team
- Step 3: Set default metrics for each persona: Create a team per persona (for tech teams, one team per actual team). You can define a default metric which will always be used for this team as default in Explorer and Advanced Explorer. See Teams for setup instructions.
- Step 4: Use Costory templates for each persona: Start from the pre-built dashboard templates in Costory and customize them per persona. See Dashboards for template options.
Related
- Cost Metrics for a full comparison of each metric and how it handles credits and discounts.
- Savings Plan discount sharing issues to understand why Contracted Cost is more stable.
- Teams for setting default metrics per team.
- FinOps metrics for exec team for building executive-level reports.