AWS Cost & Usage Dashboard Quick Start Guide
Introduction
This Dashboard has been created to help Teams understand the cost, usage, and environmental impact 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, orOCTO.Service Area - Service Area that usage is related to e.g.
HostingApplication - Application that usage is related to e.g.
CCMSAccount - AWS Account Name e.g.
Cloud PlatformNamespace - Cloud Platform Namespace (Environment) name e.g.
laa-amend-a-claim-devBilling 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, orNo is-production tagi.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.
NOMISandnomis. 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.
Total Emissions Change - Last 2 complete months
This panel will only show the percentage difference in emission for the last two complete months of usage. Changing the Billing Period in the controls may result in a No Data message if the data range doesn’t include data from the previous two months.
Miles Driven in Average Family Car Last Full Month
Equivalent total emissions in miles driven in an average family car for the previous month. Changing the Billing Period in the controls may result in a No Data message if the data range doesn’t include data from the previous month.
Note on Emissions
All Emissions data is expressed in tCO2e. This is tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a standard unit used to measure and compare the climate impact of different greenhouse gases (GHGs) by converting them to the amount of carbon dioxide that would cause the same warming effect. It’s crucial in carbon accounting for calculating total greenhouse gas footprints, as gases like methane and nitrous oxide have much higher global warming potentials (GWPs).
Usage Emissions
Usage Emissions (or Operational Carbon) are greenhouse gases generated from the electricity consumed to power and cool servers, networking equipment, and storage devices during day-to-day operations.
Embedded Emissions
Embedded Emissions (or Embodied Carbon) is the carbon emitted during the manufacturing, transportation, installation, and disposal of physical hardware devices.