I used to do this in a spreadsheet for an old client. The spreadsheet combined two sources into a single flat table:
1. AWS resource list, tags and spend.
2. Datadog utilisation.
From this sheet a derivative sheet was created that had functionality on it, so that the data sheet could be regularly updated. The sheet was sorted in order of cost, and a cumulative sum totalled up all the spend. The column next to that gave a cumulative percentage of total spend so you could quickly see how spend was distributed.
There was a set of indicator columns at the end of table calculated by formula which show 0 or 1 dependent on whether the indicator applied. The indicators where things like:
1. Can down-grade instance.
2. Can kill instance.
3. Consider for contract.
4. Cheaper on Azure.
5. Can be on-demand.
6. Is unreliable.
etc.
As we thought of new things I'd add them to the spreadsheet. This was of working was very effective.
Have you been in touch with Amazon? When I worked at a company that used AWS, they had a couple support engineers come out to our office for a day or two to help us cut costs. They said their whole job was going around and helping people spend less on AWS. They might like a tool like this, and have some good ideas for you, too.
I didnt try to contact them yet, I'm working on some upcoming cool features, also I will release the support of GCP this week. Once done, I will do more effort on the marketing part :)
How is this tool going to help me reduce cost better than AWS’s built in cost explorer and related tools? Not really seeing the added value, but I might be missing something.
AWS cost explorer gives you only the proportions of costs spent for each service you use, and it requires deep understanding of AWS to get the value our of cost explorer (like adding tags, buying reserved instances, etc ..). however this tool, can be used by everyone, its user friendly, it gives you an overview of all services you're using and shows in a map format the regions you're using, and it gives you recommendations and you can even deploy actions like deploying a lambda function to delete unused disks or snapshots (this feature will be added in upcoming days). Also, this tool supports multiple cloud providers, so with one tool you can analyze and detect potential cloud cost savings.
