Business Units

Spend Analysis

Spend Analysis provides you with information on cost split-up by service, account, region, component, trend, resource, and instance type. When you select a specific BU from the dashboard as shown in Fig. 1, you'll be taken to the spend analysis section of your BU where details of total cost accrued, maximum spending account, and minimum spending account are provided. You can also set a custom duration and pick different cost types like Blended, Unblended, Amortized, or Recurring from the drop-down. Learn more about scheduling your cost and usage reports for spend analysis of a BU.

Fig. 2: BU Spend Analysis

Resource Explorer

The BU Resource Explorer provides you with an aggregated view of your AWS resources in various categories like Accounts, Region, Service, or Tags for each BU. When you select View Details in the Accounts Splitup view of a specific BU as shown in Fig. 2, you'll be taken to the resource explorer section. The granular details of your resource level spending can be viewed on a daily, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, and can be exported as a PDF or emailed immediately. You can also set a custom duration and pick different cost types like Blended, Unblended, Amortized, or Recurring from the drop-down. Learn more about scheduling your cost and usage reports for Resource Explorer.

Fig. 3: BU Resource Explorer

You can create budgets for each BU to manage your costs proactively. Each budget configured for a BU will run monthly, quarterly, yearly, month to date, or year to date to notify you of any cost overruns. When you create a budget policy to associate with a budget, you can assign it to an existing BU. In this way, each team can track and manage its cloud costs within a budget. You can also get alerts about threshold breaches of a budget by:

• Setting the budget amount in dollars.
• Setting the budget value in percentage to track the rise or drop in percent.

To configure a budget for a BU, you need to:

1. Choose Budget from the left navigation pane, and click Configure Budget in the top-right corner.
2. Type the Display Name for the new budget.
3. Choose Add for the Budget Policy if you're creating a budget for the first time. Budget policies are reusable across multiple budgets.

   

   Fig. 4: Budget policy associated with a BU

4. Type a display name for the new budget policy in the Budget Policy dialog box, and select the Resource Type as Business Units. Choose the BU from the drop-down to which the budget will be associated. The Cost type lets you select different cost types for your budget policy: Blended, Unblended, Amortized, Recurring. Click Save.
5. Select the Period from the drop-down to set the duration for your budget.
6. Select the measurement in the Unit field to configure the budget for your cloud costs. You can select either Amount (in dollars) or Percentage (with an option to select the rise or drop percentage).
7. Enter the Budget Value either in Amount or Percent, according to the Unit chosen. Your actual spend will be evaluated against this value once every day, and an alert will be triggered if actual spending exceeds the budget value.
8. Finally, select the email ID from the Send Email To drop-down to receive budget alert notifications.

   

   Fig. 5: R&D quarterly budget allocation

For business units (BU), allocating costs to individual departments equally and sticking to the monthly budget can be a cumbersome process. However, responsibility accounting or chargebacks can help administrators in finding out the departments that cross the budget or help them track factors that ballooned the expense and play a pivotal role in the implementation of tools like budgeting and forecasting. When budgeting is all about a business unit's targets or expected expenses, forecasting is a reality check that analyzes the historical data and provides an idea whether the expenses will meet the budget goals or exceed it. Forecasting thereby provides administrators an opportunity to rightsize resources or make changes in the plan accordingly.

With Forecast for BUs you can obtain an estimated total bill amount for your chargeback entities for the current or ongoing month based on your past usage. It can help you in assessing the split-up expenditure for individual business units, plan accordingly, and take measures not to exceed the monthly budget.

Billing reports provide cloud cost visibility into the current cost trends of your BU, and slice-and-dice reporting facilitates effective tracking of cost. With cost reporting, you can schedule reports monthly, quarterly, or yearly, to each BU. This way, you can schedule usage reports for BUs as often as you want.

Types of reporting for a BU

(i) Business Units List: The BU dashboard

As shown in Fig. 1, you can easily schedule reports for multiple BUs from the BU dashboard. The default frequency for such reports is monthly. Once you configure the BU lists reports, a pop-up screen (shown in Fig. 6 below) appears. BU lists facilitates selecting one or more BU for whom the report is scheduled monthly.

Fig. 6: Schedule reports for a BU list

(ii) Reporting from Spend Analysis for BUs

Within a BU, you can select specific accounts for which the spend analysis section will be loaded with data, and the report can be shared immediately using the Share option.

Fig. 7: Select specific accounts from BU Spend Analysis to share reports

On clicking Schedule Report, you can schedule the Spend Analysis reports for your entire BU in a monthly, quarterly, or yearly frequency to the email ID you specify.

Fig. 8: Schedule reports for BU Spend Analysis

(iii) Reporting from Resource Explorer for BUs

For a BU, you can pick specific accounts for which the Resource Explorer section will be loaded with data, and the report can be shared immediately using the Share option.

Fig. 9: Select specific accounts in a BU Resource Explorer to share reports

The Schedule Report feature in this section lets you generate this report based on grouping criteria like Region, Service, and Accounts on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Fig. 10: Schedule reports for a BU Resource Explorer

(iv) Schedule Reports from the Admin tab

The Schedule Reports feature in the Admin section provides you with an overview of all the reports that have been scheduled till now. You can schedule reports for a BU from the Admin section on a yearly, quarterly, or monthly basis. If you have already scheduled a report for BU lists, BU Spend Analysis, or BU Resource Explorer, but would like to schedule it immediately, you can select Schedule Now in the hamburger icon.

Fig. 11: Schedule reports for BU Spend Analysis