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AWS Cost & Usage Dashboard Quick Start Guide

Introduction

This Dashboard has been created to help Teams understand the cost and usage associated to their AWS resources.

The purpose of this quick start guide is to help Teams familiarise themselves with how the Dashboard works and the types of data available.

Controls

These controls allow you to filter the data in the Dashboard via a number of mandatory tags and important data types. You can use as many filters as required to identify your data.

Control definitions:

  • Business Unit - Should be one of HMPPS, OPG, LAA, Central Digital, Technology Services, HMCTS, CICA, or Platforms.

Note: OCTO does not yet appear in the list, pending agreement of changes to the tagging standard.

  • Service Area - Service Area that usage is related to e.g. Hosting

  • Application - Application that usage is related to e.g. CCMS

  • Account - AWS Account Name e.g. Cloud Platform

  • Namespace - Cloud Platform Namespace (Environment) name e.g. laa-amend-a-claim-dev

  • Billing Period - The time window AWS uses to calculate usage

  • Owner - This is the team responsible for the overall service

  • Environment - Identifies whether usage relates to Production, Non-Production, or No is-production tag i.e. missing tags

Note: Many of these values are free text and case sensitive so you may find many combinations of similar tags depending on how they have been entered e.g. NOMIS and nomis. Recommended you correct tags for consistency.

If you wish to reset a control to remove it or change it use the “Show selected” radio button to show values that can be removed.

If you expect to see a particular value in the list of values but it is not there please check your AWS resource tags in the first instance. Otherwise, contact COAT

For more information on mandatory resource tags please refer to the Tagging Standard

Tagging Coverage for Business Unit

This section shows compliance with the MoJ Tagging Standard. You can use this to improve your taggaing and usage allocation i.e. to make sure you have a full picture of your costs

Cost by Category

This section helps you understand your cost in different ways:

  • Cost in USD - Total cost

  • Cost per Region - Cost split by AWS Region

  • Cost over Time - Timeseries for cost over the seleceted billing period

  • Cost per environment - Cost split by user defined enviornment

  • Cost per Business Area - Cost split by Business Unit

Kubernetes (EKS) Cost

This section only relates to services that are running on a Kubernetes cluster e.g. Cloud Platform.

For users running on these types of platform it is difficult to understand compute cost, as containers are running on large shared EC2 Instances. This view allows you to see Used and Unused cost. The Used cost tells you how much your compute resources actually cost. Unused indicates over provisioning and opportunities for right-sizing.

Top 10s

This section shows curated views of the top 10 of cost and usage sorted a number of different ways to help identify opportunities for optimisation. This includes Application, AWS Services (e.g. RDS, S3, EC2), Namespaces (relates to Cloud Platform hosted apps only) and AWS Account.

This page was last reviewed on 4 December 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 4 June 2026 by the page owner #coat-notifications .