How to use the dynamic cost explorer, save a report and add it to a dashboard

Teevity lets you create reports from the Dynamic Cost Explorer either for the costs per cloud provider accounts or costs by allocation units and use those reports as widgets on a dashboard.

Explore your cloud costs with the dynamic cost explorer

The dynamic cost explorer is accessible from a dashboard in the "Detailed cost analysis" section (1).

Once in the dynamic cost explorer, in the top bar menu, you can find the different types of reports for the cost explorer:

Summary reports : let you explore the billing data by account with the usual filters: account, region, product etc.
Details reports are more specialized version of the summary reports and gives you more control on the criteria for your queries and lets you do queries based on your cost allocation units
Compare reports to compare the results of two queries
Reservations reports for queries dedicated to commitment usage (reserved instances, etc.)

The sum of all the Cost Allocation Units created by a Cost Partition is always equals to your total spending.

In reports and graphs you will see a value or line called "Others" which will represent the resources which are not tagged.

Summary Reports and general information about the dynamic cost explorer

You will find there the following basic filters :

Accounts of your cloud providers
Regions where your cloud resources are deployed (us-east1, Google/Americas, etc.)
Products you're using (EC2, AppEngine, SQL Azure, etc.)
Operations i.e. different flavors of the product (On demande - Reserved instance for EC2, PutObject for S3, Bandwidth for App Engine etc.)
Usage types : that will be the different sizes and types of instance (m4.x.large for AWS, N1 Standard for GCP, etc.)

For example below we have selected ec2_instance as the product without any additional filter or grouping.

Below the graph a table displays the sum for each month and the average daily cost.

The graph will show you the daily cost for last 30 days but you can zoom in by selecting a timeframe with a "click and drag":

You have the choice to group (1) the data by any dimension, for example here we are grouping the instances by type:

For any give period you can see the breakdown by clicking on the graph and by using the click + Alt key combinaison you can drill down on a particular series.

When you click on a series in the table, you toggle its visibility:

The filter box lets you select the values of the series. More information about the filters and their advanced syntax is available on this page.

Details Reports

The details reports page gives you more control on the parameters of a query. They are are available for the data breakdown by:

accounts like in the summary page (Menu "general details")
or by cost allocations units. For more information about how to configure your costs by tags, cost partitions and cost allocation units, read this page.

Those additional parameters :

(1) the start date and time (inclusive)
(1) the end date and time (exclusive)
(2) To show the data by cost or usage
(3) Group the data by one or more series : account, region, product, cost allocation unit, operation or usage type
(4) Change the granularity from hourly to monthly and if it's a cumulative graph on the period
(5) The type of graph : Line, Column or Area (stacked or not) and change the theme

Like in the summary page, you have to click on the submit button to see the result of a query. The time to get the report can vary depending if it's has been already pre-computed or not.

Here's a graph of the cost of ec2 instances over 6 months group by instance type, the table below the graph will give you the total for the period and each group of data but also the minimum, maximum and average values.

You can use your cost partitions and cost allocation units to breakdown your costs. In the menu, choose Details > "Details by cost allocation units". Here we have grouped the costs on the same period (6 months) by cost allocation units of the cost partition "Costs per Environment and Component" and selecting only those of the production environment.

If you look at the filter box you will see a button next to it to enable the binding of the filter (1). By default it's enabled and so if new values appear in subsequent data collections, like a new region in our example, they will be automatically selected by this filter.

More information about the filters and their advanced syntax is available on this page.

Compare Reports

N.B. : You can also compare 2 reports on the same graph with the overlay feature

This page lets you compare two queries of the dynamic cost explorer. Like the details page those reports are available for both the data by accounts or by cost allocation units.

The reference data presents the usual query parameters (see detailed report section above).

The comparison data parameters will select by default the same parameters but for the previous month. You can see a summary of the comparison with a link to both detailed reports (1)

The graph below the summary data will give a daily view of the comparison and also a breakdown of the comparison with the top 10 differences

If you want to compare 2 costs perimeters instead of the same perimeter on 2 time periods, you can set the time shift parameter to 0 and select different values for the comparison data filters. For example here we compare 2 cost allocation units of the cost partition "costs per customer".

Reservations Report

Read our page about the Reserved Instance Optimization report.

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