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
Step 1: Match a metric to each persona
- Tech team: usage-based or amortized cost. Hide credits, savings plans, and reservations (savings plans have a caveat, see Step 2). Daily or hourly granularity.
- Accounting team: amortized cost, so AWS upfront costs are spread over time. Daily or hourly granularity.
- Finance team: billed cost, the cash paid each month. Monthly granularity.
Step 2: Handle reservations and savings plans
A global savings plan spread across accounts can move between accounts over time, which creates fake cost swings per account. Contracted Cost is the cost without the savings plan but with your EDP, so it stays stable against those movements. To catch savings plan under-use or over-use, create an alert.Step 3: Set a default metric per persona
Create a team per persona (for tech, one team per actual team). Set a default metric for each team so Explorer and dashboards use it automatically. See Teams for setup.Step 4: Start from Costory templates
Start from the pre-built dashboard templates and customize one per persona. See Dashboards for the available templates.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.