Enable AWS CloudWatch

I am using AWS and would like to track my spending in a very granular manner. How should I go about doing this, for example using CloudWatch?

CloudBank (the organization) is the finance office that pays the bills. To get into cost-tracking as a project manager is both admirable and non-trivial. Here are some ideas…

  • Have CloudBank create multiple accounts for you (AWS, Azure, GCP etc). Each sub-account can have a budget and a set of IAM Users. The result is a spend breakout with that granularity. The downside is learning how to share services (like for example S3 buckets) across these accounts.

  • CloudBank can turn on the AWS Billing Console. This should provide access to CloudWatch alarms. However there is a catch, this will not show actual charges: When CloudBank uses spend-reduction measures such as Reserved Instances: This will not show up in the billing console. It just won’t register because it is charged to your account after the fact. This is not to say this idea won’t work; but it may run into some post facto problems in resolving actual spend.

  • CloudBank monitors the actual charges using a tool called Nutanix Beam or ‘Beam’ for short. Users have access to view spend in Beam but cannot set budget alerts. As a result the option is to work with CloudBank to create billing alerts in Beam in a collaborative manner. These alerts can be pretty granular in terms of service type, data center location, resource tags, and time (down to say monthly).

To initiate any of these processes or ask more questions: Send email to help@cloudbank.org describing what you are hoping to do.