Customizing the data export from a Cost Report
Today, Vantage announces the launch of Cost Report Exports: Customers now have the ability to customize what data they are exporting from Cost Reports. In the new “Export Data” modal, users can customize what columns, dates, and date bin are exported into a CSV. This enhanced flexibility helps finance and FinOps professionals who wish to perform deeper analysis of cost data in Excel.
Before, Cost Reports had a simple “Export Data” button that allowed for downloading a CSV representation of the cost report with each row representing a service and each column representing a day of the specified date range. While the that experience provided quick access to data, customers with more complex use cases in Excel were left without the ability to specify formats or additional data they needed included in the CSV download to effectively pull this data for further financial analysis.
Now, “Export Data” on each Cost Report will trigger a modal to allow users to arbitrarily choose which format they would like to group data by, a date range and a date bin. Customers will be able to choose any combination of groupings from the following list: Provider, Service, Category, Sub Category, Account and Resource. When the Export is finished generating, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the exported data, typically within a few minutes.
This functionality is available to all users at the time of this blog post being published. Head to any Cost Report, click the “…” button and select “Export Data” to trigger the modal for exporting. To read more about customizing exported data, please visit the Cost Report documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today Vantage is launching the ability to export data in a more customizable manner, allowing you to define the format and presentation of your cost data to be further analyzed in tools like Excel. You can rely on Vantage to ingest, normalize and structure your cost data across providers and use this new functionality to export the data in the format you need.
2. Who is the customer?
Anyone who wants to perform further data analysis, typically through Excel. Most often the use-cases this feature supports is for deeper financial analysis that cannot be performed in the Vantage console. This feature tends to be used by FinOps practitioners at larger enterprise organizations.
3. How much does this cost?
There is no additional cost for cost report exports.
4. What format do report exports come in?
Report exports only come in CSV format at this time.
5. How long do exports take to generate?
Typically under a minute. For large date ranges it could be a bit longer. You will receive an email when the export is available for download.
6. What are the list of attributes that I am capable of grouping data by?
The current list of supported attributes for grouping are the following:
- Provider (AWS, GCP, New Relic, etc)
- Service (EC2, EBS, etc)
- Service category (Storage, Compute, etc..)
- Service subcategory (m5.large, StandardTier, etc..)
- Account (AWS member account, GCP project, etc)
- Resource (S3 Bucket ARN, EC2 Instance ID, MongoDB Atlas Cluster name, etc..)
7. What are the list of date bins that I can select to export by?
The available date bins for Report Exports are the following:
- Day
- Week
- Month
8. The blog post mentions that I receive reports by email - can I adjust who receives these emails?
You can enter your email as well as the emails of other users on your team. Only users with access to the workspace where the report exists can download the export.
9. An attribute I want to group data by to export isn’t available. Will you add it?
Maybe. Please contact your customer success manager or email support@vantage.sh with your product feature request. Once we understand the request and use-case, it’s possible we can expose the data to be exported.
10. I don’t want to receive emails for cost report exports, can I just download the report from the browser directly?
At this time only email is supported.
11. Are the same customizable options in the modal available as arguments to the Vantage API?
No, these export options are not yet available in the API.
12. Are generated cost report exports viewable in the console after they are downloaded?
No, at this time there is no page where you can view all exports.
13. Are there any restrictions to the export?
Currently if you have a report grouped by a specific tag/key pair that view of the data can not be represented in the export. However, you can still download the direct representation of the report from the Export Data modal.
