The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a treasure trove of detailed billing data, but in its raw form, it’s more like a cumbersome spreadsheetโoverwhelming in scope and often hard to translate into actionable insights. The challenge lies in turning this raw data into something meaningfulโinsights that can help you optimize your cloud investments, prevent overspending, and plan for the future. Integrating Amazon QuickSight with AWS CUR brings much more clarity to your spending data. By integrating AWS CUR with QuickSight, you can unlock the true potential of your AWS cost and usage report, transforming it into visually compelling, easy-to-understand dashboards and reports.
The best part? This integration is straightforward and doesn’t require in-depth expertise in QuickSight. In this article, we will guide you step-by-step on how to integrate CUR with QuickSight, and how to create powerful visualizations to help you stay on top of your cloud costs.
What Is AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a comprehensive dataset provided by AWS that records detailed information about your cloud spending and usage patterns. CUR is designed to offer a granular view of all your costs, down to individual resource usage, allowing you to track how much you’re spending on each service, region, or account. This report includes everything from EC2 instance charges, data transfer costs, Lambda invocations, to even AWS support fees.
However, while the CUR provides all the data you need, interpreting it can be a daunting task due to its sheer volume and complexity. Manually sifting through this vast amount of information can be challenging, especially for stakeholders who need clear insights to manage costs effectively. This is where visual analytics tools like Amazon QuickSight come into play, making the AWS Cost and Usage Report actionable and easy to understand, helping you turn raw data into valuable insights that drive financial decisions.
Amazon QuickSight: Visualizing Your Cloud Costs
Amazon QuickSight is a powerful business intelligence (BI) service from AWS that allows you to create rich, interactive visualizations from your cloud data. QuickSight enables you to connect directly to various AWS data sources, including the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), and transform the raw data into insightful dashboards and reports. This capability is especially useful for FinOps teams that need to visualize cloud costs across accounts, services, and regions. With its intuitive interface, QuickSight allows you to create dashboards with bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and more all of which make interpreting cost and usage data more accessible and informative.
One of QuickSight’s standout features is SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), which lets you store data in memory, allowing you to perform high-speed analytics and quickly generate visualizations, even for large datasets. QuickSight and CUR also integrate with Amazon Athena, enabling you to query your CUR data using SQL-like syntax before visualizing it. The combination of QuickSight and Athena offers a powerful solution for gaining detailed insights into your cloud spending without the need to manage complex infrastructure or write code-intensive reports.
Why Integrate AWS CUR with Amazon QuickSight?
Integrating AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) with Amazon QuickSight provides a streamlined way to convert raw spending data into meaningful insights, enabling efficient cost management. Here are the key reasons to consider this integration:
- Visual Insights: QuickSight helps turn complex CUR data into easily understandable charts and graphs, making it easier to spot patterns, anomalies, and trends.
- Centralized Cost Monitoring: Centralize your cloud spending data in an accessible format for key stakeholders.
- Advanced Analytics: With powerful analytical tools, you can analyze resource-level spending, analyze by service, and generate forecasts.
- Cost Anomaly Detection: Integrating CUR with QuickSight helps identify unexpected cost spikes or cost anomalies that could indicate issues such as misconfigured resources, inefficient usage, or security incidents.
- Cost Allocation and Chargeback: CUR, integrated with QuickSight, allows you to create dashboards that visualize costs based on tags, accounts, or business units. This enables accurate chargeback reporting, giving teams visibility into their spending and encouraging efficient cloud utilization.
Integrating AWS CUR with QuickSight: Step-by-Step Guide
To fully utilize the benefits of AWS CUR with Amazon QuickSight, it is essential to understand the setup process clearly. The following steps will guide you through integrating CUR with QuickSight effectively.
Step 1: Set Up Your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
- Go to the Billing and Cost Management console in AWS.
- If you haven’t enabled CUR yet, click on “Create Report” under Cost & Usage Reports.
- If you already have a CUR, ensure that your report data integration is set to Amazon QuickSight.
Enable Report Data Integration:
- When you choose QuickSight as the integration, AWS will automatically generate CUR files in CSV format and compress them using GZIP.
- AWS will also create a QuickSight Manifest file alongside each CUR report, which is essential for integrating with QuickSight.
Check the S3 Bucket:
- Make sure that both the CSV files and the QuickSight Manifest file are in the S3 bucket you specified when setting up your CUR.
- Verify CSV Files in the folder with a path similar to
/bucket-name/prefix-name/aws-cur-report-name/yyyy-mm/.Look formanifest.jsonfile in the same directory. Optionally, you can download themanifest.jsonto verify it lists all CSV files. - Keep in mind that it can take up to 24 hours for AWS to deliver your first CUR report.
Step 2: Allow QuickSight to Access Your S3 Bucket
- Go to the Amazon QuickSight console.
- Click on your profile icon in the top right corner and select Manage QuickSight.
- On the left-hand menu, click on Security & permissions.
- Under QuickSight access to AWS services, click Manage.
- Make sure the Amazon S3 box is checked. If it is not, check it now.
- Click on Select S3 buckets and select the bucket containing your CUR files.
- Choose Finish, and then click Save.
Step 3: Ingest Your CUR into Amazon QuickSight
Create a New Dataset:
- In the QuickSight console, choose New Analysis and then click on New Dataset.
- Under Create a Dataset, select S3 as the data source.
Provide Manifest File URL:
- Enter a name for the data source.
- Provide the QuickSight Manifest file URL from your S3 bucket.
Connect QuickSight to CUR Data:
- Click on Connect.
- Once QuickSight successfully connects to your CUR data, you will be given the option to preview the data.
Edit/Preview Data:
- You can choose to unselect or rename fields by clicking on Edit/Preview data.
- If no changes are needed, click Visualize to complete the integration.
Step 4: Creating Visualizations of Your AWS Spending Using QuickSight
QuickSight allows you to build dashboards that reflect various views of your cloud cost and usage data. Create dashboards focusing on monthly spending trends, service-specific costs, and forecasting future spending.
Bar Graph Visualization Using QuickSightโs AutoGraph Feature:
- QuickSight provides an AutoGraph feature that automatically chooses the best visual representation for your data.
- For example, select the fields lineitem/ProductCode and lineItem/UsageAmount. QuickSight will generate a bar graph automatically.
By following these steps, you will have successfully integrated your AWS Cost and Usage Report with Amazon QuickSight and created visualizations that make your cloud spending data easy to interpret and act upon.
Best Practices for Effective CUR and QuickSight Integration
1. Filter Unnecessary Data
CUR data can be extensive, containing fields that may not be relevant to your analysis. Create custom views or limit the columns and rows queried to avoid excessive data import into QuickSight, improving overall performance.
2. Use SPICE for Faster Dashboards
QuickSight’s SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) can be leveraged to store data in memory, leading to faster dashboard load times. Import frequently queried CUR data into SPICE to enhance performance for large-scale datasets.
3. Establish Governance and Access Control
Since cost data can be sensitive, implement AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to CUR and QuickSight. Ensure that users only have access to dashboards and data relevant to their role.
4. Automate CUR Updates
Ensure that the data in QuickSight is always up to date by configuring automated refreshes. Set up regular refresh schedules in QuickSight so that your reports and dashboards reflect the latest cost information.
5. Leverage Data Preparation in QuickSight
Utilize QuickSight’s data preparation tools to clean and transform CUR data before building visualizations. Aggregating, filtering, and transforming data can reduce complexity and improve the quality of insights derived from your dashboards.
Gain Better Cost Insights and Cost Data Visualization with Economize
While AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and Amazon QuickSight offer cost tracking and visualization features, they come with limitations that can make understanding cloud expenditures complex and cumbersome. Economize, on the other hand, is a powerful cloud cost management platform designed to provide deeper cost insights, real-time monitoring, and actionable recommendations, simplifying the process of optimizing your AWS costs.
Why Economize Outshines AWS CUR and QuickSight?
Continuous Cloud Cost Optimization:
- With Economize, you get a comprehensive and continuous approach to cloud cost optimization that goes beyond simply aggregating cost data.
- Economize scans for potential savings opportunities instantly after connecting your cloud accounts, offering real-time recommendations for optimizing your costs.
In contrast, AWS CUR provides detailed reports on usage and cost, but it requires significant manual effort to extract meaningful insights. Integrating CUR with QuickSight for visualization adds an additional layer of complexity. Economize simplifies this entire process, eliminating the need for manual configuration and continuous adjustments.
Simplified Integration and Setup:
- Setting up Economize is as simple as it gets. With a ridiculously easy integration process, you can connect your AWS accounts or GCP projects in under five minutes.
- The agentless setup ensures that you can quickly get started and focus on optimizing your cloud spend.
On the other hand, configuring CUR and integrating it with QuickSight requires several steps. Economize cuts through this complexity, allowing you to connect and start saving immediately.
Comprehensive Cost Data Visualization:
- Economize brings your cloud cost data to life with interactive and intuitive visualizations that are easy to interpret and act upon.
- You can easily drill down into specific areas of your spending, view cost breakdowns by service or resource, and visualize changes over time using detailed charts.
QuickSight lets you visualize CUR data, but you need to manually set up data imports, create the visualizations, and frequently update the settings as your cloud environment changes. Economize provides out-of-the-box visualizations tailored to cloud cost management, ensuring that you have all the information you need at your fingertips
Real-Time Monitoring and Anomaly Detection:
- Economize offers real-time monitoring of your cloud spend, which ensures that you’re always informed of any unexpected incidents.
- You receive instant notifications for cost spikes, allowing you to address issues before they spiral out of control.
- Anomaly detection ensures that hidden cost surprises are uncovered promptly, providing you with the power to act before they become costly.
AWS CUR and QuickSight, on the other hand, provide a retrospective view of your cloud spending.
Actionable Recommendations for Cost Savings:
- Economize serves as your personal cost-saving advisor, providing customized recommendations to help you optimize your cloud spending.
- The Recommendations Engine identifies hidden optimization opportunities that standard cloud provider tools may overlook.
- Economize also provides specific actions for rightsizing resources, optimizing over-provisioned instances, and managing underutilized services, ensuring that your cloud environment is both efficient and cost-effective.
AWS CUR alone lacks the capability to offer actionable recommendationsโit is merely a reporting tool. QuickSight also lacks the ability to analyze cost data and suggest specific actions for optimization.
Enhanced Reporting and Custom Views:
- Economize offers detailed reports that provide a clear and comprehensive view of your cloud costs. You can use customizable filters to analyze your data from different perspectives and find insights that lead to cost savings.
- The Organization View lets you dive deep into the nitty-gritty details of your cloud spending, making it easy to understand costs at a granular level.
While QuickSight can generate custom reports, the setup requires considerable manual effort, and the reporting is only as good as the data structure and visualizations created by the user.
Conclusion
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and Amazon QuickSight can provide basic cost tracking and visualization, but they come with significant limitations that make effective cloud cost management a complex and time-consuming task. Economize takes cloud cost management to the next level, offering real-time monitoring, proactive recommendations, root cause analysis, and detailed visualizations, all in one easy-to-use platform.
By using Economize, you gain better cost insights, improved cost data visualization, and a comprehensive view of your cloud expenditures. It transforms cloud cost management from a reactive, labor-intensive task to a proactive, streamlined process, helping you save money, and maximize your cloud resources effectively.
FAQs:
Q: What is the difference between AWS Cost Explorer and QuickSight?
A: AWS Cost Explorer provides built-in tools for analyzing and tracking AWS cost and usage, while QuickSight is a fully customizable business intelligence tool that allows you to create advanced visualizations and reports, including for AWS CUR data.
Q: What is the Cost and Usage Report in AWS?
A: The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) provides the most detailed information about your AWS usage and costs, helping you analyze, track, and allocate your cloud spending.
Q: How to manage your cloud costs?
A: To manage cloud costs, use tools like AWS Cost Explorer for tracking usage, set budget alerts, review usage patterns regularly, and optimize resources to avoid unnecessary spending.
Feeling the Weight of High Cloud Bills?
Controlling your cloud budget doesn’t have to be complicated. With Economize, we make it easy to slash your costs by up to 30%. Schedule a free demo today and begin your journey towards more manageable cloud spending. Start seeing the benefits in your budget right away.
