📄️ About Cost
Use the Cost module in Stax to explore your AWS usage in detail. You can see your daily, weekly, or monthly usage for the past 3 years, broken down by usage code, service, account, or region, and see your trends and change over time. If you've added budgets, you can easily see how you're tracking against them.
📄️ Access to Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data in S3
For organizations with a resold account ownership model, Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data is available in S3. This allows organizations to access the report in both comma-separated value (CSV) and parquet formats. You can read, download, and copy the data from the S3 bucket, allowing extremely detailed analysis of AWS spend.
📄️ Accessing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances Recommendations
Stax does not provide Savings Plans recommendations, but organizations with Stax-managed AWS accounts can access both Savings Plans and Reserved Instances recommendations using the AWS CLI and API.
📄️ Budgets
Setting budgets in Stax gives greater visibility to you and your team of how you're tracking against budget. With a budget set, you can configure notifications to let you know when it looks like you're going to exceed your budget so you can take action before it's too late.
📄️ Changes to historic cost data retention
On 27 October 2022, Stax announced changes to the retention of historic data in the Cost module.
📄️ Cost and Compliance Module IAM Role Permissions
Stax uses AWS IAM best practices for enabling third-party access to accounts, as described by AWS.
📄️ Finding Unallocated Resources on the Raw Data page
When creating Views in Stax, any resources that are not assigned to another segment are automatically assigned to the default Unallocatedsegment. You can use the Raw Data page to determine which resources they are. Once you've discovered the resources in the Unallocated segment, you can update the tags on the resources themselves, or update the configuration of your View to assign them to the correct segment.
📄️ How to Action Wastage Reports
In a dynamic and flexible environment like AWS, keeping track of all the things that contribute to wastage is hard. Without regular check-ups, it's easy for wastage to get out of control.
📄️ Linking your AWS accounts to Stax Cost & Compliance
The Stax Cost & Compliance module accesses your AWS data securely using an AWS IAM role. This role is read-only, and does not provide access to data outside of that needed to retrieve billing and compliance information.
📄️ Making EC2 Wastage Memory-Aware
When it comes to wastage in EC2 instances, Stax can retrieve metrics from CloudWatch to track an instance's memory utilization.
📄️ Migrating from the Cost module to AWS cost tools
If you use the Stax Cost module to manage your costs in AWS, you might want to consider some of the alternatives below. In general, you can start by investigating the capabilities of the AWS Billing and Cost Management suite, covered here. Additionally, if you have AWS Enterprise Support, your TAM can help with this too.
📄️ Permissions Needed to Link AWS to Stax Cost & Compliance
This guidance assumes you're subscribed to only the Stax Cost & Compliance module. If your AWS accounts are Stax-managed, Stax takes care of this for you.
📄️ Remove Cost and Compliance Module Role
If you no longer wish to use the Stax Cost & Compliance module, remove the IAM Role that grants it access to your billing and compliance data.
📄️ Replacing the Detailed Billing Report with the Cost and Usage Report
The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is how AWS provides a comprehensive dataset of the usage in your AWS environment. It replaces the now-deprecated Detailed Billing Reports (DBR) technology.
📄️ Request a backfill of CUR data
For organizations who have recently onboarded to Stax, it's possible that your configured Cost and Usage Report (CUR) does not contain all historical data. This will result in Stax not being able to represent billing data from before the organization was onboarded.
📄️ Resolve a Client ID Mismatch When Linking Accounts
When using the Cost & Compliance module to link your AWS account to Stax, you may receive an error message The Stax Client ID in the CloudFormation template was edited. This error means that the Client ID entered when deploying the Stax IAM Role via the CloudFormation template was incorrect.
📄️ Resolve a "Confirmation from AWS Not Received" Error
This guidance assumes you're subscribed to only the Stax Cost & Compliance module. If your AWS accounts are Stax-managed, Stax takes care of this for you.
📄️ Resolve an Access Denied to Billing Reports Error
When using the Stax Cost & Compliance module, you may receive an error message stating Access Denied to Detailed Billing Reports: We were unable to access the specified S3 bucket. This error means that Stax was unable to access the S3 bucket to retrieve your AWS accounts' billing reports.
📄️ Resolve an S3 Bucket Empty error
When using the Stax Cost & Compliance module, you may receive an error message stating S3 Bucket Empty: The S3 bucket your-billing-bucket does not contain the detailed billing report. This error means that the S3 bucket you've configured Stax to retrieve your billing reports from does not contain any billing reports.
📄️ Savings Plans & Reservations
The Savings Plans & Reservations page helps your organization to track its usage of these two cost-saving mechanisms in AWS. To access detailed purchasing recommendations for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, see Accessing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances Recommendations.
📄️ The Cost Dashboard
The Cost Dashboard page, within the Cost Module, allows for detailed inspection of both usage costs and financial cost of AWS consumption. The page can be filtered using global filters, and further refined by toggling Financial Mode on or off. When these settings are configured, all data on the Cost Dashboard page is updated to reflect them.
📄️ Understanding Delays in Cost Data in Stax
There are two common reasons as to why cost data can appear delayed in Stax:
📄️ Understanding Financial Mode
The default view in Stax, known as Usage Mode, shows usage information. This is calculated based on the overall consumption of AWS resources, and does not take into account any discounts, credits, support charges, or other factors that may be applied to your bill. From a detailed bill standpoint, Usage Mode shows only the usage amount, that is, billing items where the kind is usage.
📄️ Understanding Savings Plans in Stax
AWS Savings Plans are financial mechanisms used to reduce your AWS bill by offsetting the cost of compute usage. Savings plans are similar to Reserved Instances in that they both discount your AWS bill based on expected AWS compute usage. Like a Reserved Instance, a Savings Plan represents a commitment to an amount of AWS usage over a one- to three-year period, but at a discounted price.
📄️ Updating the Cost & Compliance Module IAM Role
Periodically, you will be required to update the IAM Role Stax uses to access your account for the purpose of acquiring cost and compliance information.
📄️ Wastage
It's easy to waste money in the cloud. In such a dynamic and flexible environment, keeping track of all the things that contribute to wastage is hard.