Use the Cost module in Stax to explore your AWS usage in detail. You can see your daily, weekly, or monthly usage 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.
Cost & Compliance Dashboard
The Cost & Compliance Dashboard allows for a high level review of usage tracking within your AWS Organization(s). The Dashboard page displays organization-wide tiles showing estimated usage this month, daily run rate for the last 30 days, estimated wastage for the current month, and compliance against configured Organization Rules. Clicking on any tile will take you to a more detailed breakdown of that data elsewhere in the Cost module.
Beneath the tiles is the Comparative View which allows selecting a View and reviewing metrics for each segment of that view:
- Spend so far this month (represented as usage cost)
- Estimated spend this month (represented as usage cost)
- A sparkline representing daily run rate for the last 30 days
- Wastage this month, by usage cost and percentage of total usage
- Organization Rules compliance
Cost Module
The Cost module supports detailed investigation into the costs associated with your organization's AWS consumption. It consists of four pages:
- Cost Dashboard provides a detailed view of both usage cost and financial cost of AWS consumption
- Wastage provides detailed insights into the organization's perceived wastage in AWS, which allows for reduction or optimization in spend
- Reserved presents analysis around EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs), including coverage of existing RIs, and recommendations for future RI purchases
- Tag Policy allows defining organizational tagging strategies and segmenting them into automatically generated Views and segments
Pages within the Cost module can be filtered using Global Filters to restrict the view of data to a specific segment within a View.
Usage Cost
The default AWS cost that is reported in Stax is based what you actually used, which might not be the same as what you paid for.
AWS has lots of ways to measure what you pay for resources, which can make it challenging to understand what your team is actually using. Tracking consumption, or usage cost, is useful for managing spend because that’s the number that you can really influence.
Stax provides two modes for viewing cost information to make this easier to understand. Usage Mode and Financial Mode can help you to better understand this information. See Financial Mode for a detailed explanation of the two modes.
The default cost you see in Stax removes some one-off charges and financial constructs like AWS Support, Tax, Reservations and Credits.
Use Financial Mode to align Stax's Cost module to your AWS bill.
