Introduction
Does your organization have more than one Amazon Web Services (AWS) account? Do you have standalone accounts that are not linked to a consolidated billing account? Or more than one consolidated billing account? If so, you’re not alone. Due to the incremental and distributed adoption of AWS across enterprises, many IT departments are struggling with AWS account complexity that’s impeding them from taking back control of the cost and usage of their cloud infrastructure.
While Amazon provides some of the best features in the industry for transparency of cost and usage for cloud infrastructure—e.g. AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Consolidated Billing, and Usage Report—these features can be difficult to use at enterprise scale due to the need to consolidate across multiple accounts. To support enterprises, CloudHealth has extended the AWS Console to provide an easy to set up and use solution that delivers a true consolidated view of cost and usage.
The problem
For an Operations or IT Finance manager, controlling the cost and usage of your AWS cloud infrastructure across multiple services and projects can be a headache at the best of times. But if you’re responsible for a large enterprise, you likely have the additional challenge of managing multiple accounts that all need to be aggregated to get a true account of cost or usage. This aggregation can be made more complex when an organization has:
- More than one consolidated billing account
- Accounts not linked to any consolidated bill
- A large number of accounts (e.g. dozens or hundreds of accounts)
How CloudHealth can help
CloudHealth enables you to aggregate the cost and usage of all your accounts—including multiple consolidated and/or standalone accounts—into a single integrated console. You can enter the accounts in CloudHealth manually or through a bulk import, where they’ll automatically be scanned and consolidated. This gives you a true consolidation reporting solution for your infrastructure and allows you to perform enterprise-wide cost and usage optimization analysis.
A brief tour of multiple accounts in CloudHealth
Let’s walk through an example of how CloudHealth supports enterprise aggregation needs.
Below is a report showing accounts imported to CloudHealth by a sample customer. The accounts include one consolidated billing account that has four linked accounts, and a separate standalone account.
If you run a Cost Allocation report for this customer, the report will automatically aggregate the data across the accounts into a single integrated statement.
You can also customize this report to categorize by billing account, in order to see the allocation of costs specific to the multiple AWS statements you receive each month.
You can also view the historical costs for all accounts, a single account, or a subset of accounts in a single view, as shown for another customer. In this example, the history is a blended view from two different consolidated billing accounts—the switch happened in mid-June; but the history presented here is a single unified view.
If you want to get more information on specific charges, you simply click on the specific item in the chart or table to view the supporting line items from the Amazon DBR. For example, if you drill-down on the $46k cost for EBS-Snapshots in July, you will be presented with the aggregated line item charges. Even if these charges span more than one consolidated account, they’ll be aggregated into a single consolidated view.
Another complication introduced by multiple billing accounts is purchasing and managing reserved instances (RIs). CloudHealth gives you features to make new RI purchases, as well as the ability to optimize existing RI inventory. Just as we do with reporting, these features work across multiple billing accounts to provide seamless aggregation for enterprise customers. Our RI management functionality recognizes the boundaries of billable accounts and correctly analyzes current RI inventory and instance usage to provide actionable recommendations.
Conclusions
Multiple consolidated billing accounts and/or standalone billing accounts can add substantial complexity to an enterprise managing cloud infrastructure. While Amazon’s features in support of transparency are unquestionably the best in the industry, they do require work from the customer to effectively use the cloud services at enterprise scale.
If you’d like to know more about how CloudHealth can help you solve your enterprise cloud management, reporting and optimization needs, please contact us or sign up for a free 14 day trial.
