Cost Fluctuation Forecast (Deprecated)

Rationale

Monitoring your AWS expenses for unexpected fluctuations will help you to identify any unusual usage patterns that may require corrective actions.

Once the Cost Fluctuation feature is enabled, Cloud Conformity will send you alerts on various communication channels whenever your AWS costs are forecasted to rise above the percentage threshold that you define within the rule settings. These costs variation alerts will help you identify exactly when the fluctuation has occurred so you can begin the investigation process.

Cloud Conformity keeps track of your monthly AWS spends based on a specified filter category (Service, Tag, etc) in order to compare your current monthly expenditure with the past month and send alert notifications if it is forecasted to exceed the monthly fluctuation threshold. The same method is implemented for the weekly threshold set for cost fluctuation.

To enable Cost Fluctuation you must provide access to the S3 bucket containing your AWS Cost Allocation billing reports, which are essentially the monthly reports with your cost allocation tag sets included. These reports (CSV files) contain data about your AWS resources usage, filtered by the hour/day/month, by product and product resource, by each account within your organization or by tags that you create.

Once these billing reports are analyzed by the Cloud Conformity rules engine, we will create a Billing & Cost Management dashboard (i.e. Cost Dashboard) for you within the Cloud Conformity account, which provides reporting, analytics, bill visualization, forecasting and other useful features so you can gain more insights into your AWS account spending patterns and get information about any cost optimization opportunities that you can implement in order to drive savings.

• AWS Services - e.g. S3, EC2, Cloudfront, etc.
• Tags - e.g. "Owner": "David", "Role": "Operations", "Environment": "Production".
• Aggregation of Tags - e.g. "Project": "CC-WPSA" and "Environment": "Staging".
• Combination of AWS Services, AWS Accounts, Regions, Tags, etc - e.g. AWS RDS Total Cost for US Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California) and US West (Oregon).

The customer-set threshold for the daily/weekly/monthly costs fluctuation and the communication channels for sending notifications can be easily configured within your Cloud Conformity account. The list of supported communication channels that you can use to receive budget alerts are Email, Slack, JIRA, ServiceNow and Zendesk. You can also configure different communication channels for different Severities.

For example, once the AWS Costs Fluctuation feature is configured, you should get email notifications if the monthly total cost of the S3 service for your AWS account is forecasted to exceed the fluctuation threshold set within the "Service" category, e.g. 1.2% above your spend last month.