Tracking costs per million users on a Cost Report
Today Vantage announces the launch of Per Unit Costs which gives customers the ability to track costs per customer, endpoint, transaction or other business metric. By importing their own KPIs into Vantage to analyze alongside cloud infrastructure costs, customers can report on costs per unit of good they sell or any other arbitrary measure. This allows organizations to put cost data in perspective to see whether costs are scaling up or down relative to top-line business metrics.
Some common examples of per unit costs include:
- Costs per DAU
- Costs per customer
- Costs per 1,000 API requests
Before, customers had the ability to create reports and filter to specific teams, features and products. However, the KPIs for those business functions were stored in other metric gathering systems such as CloudWatch or a spreadsheet. It was a manual process to export cloud costs from Vantage to analyze alongside business metrics.
Now, customers have the ability to import business metrics into Vantage to visualize and analyze them directly on Cost Reports. Users can assign a specific business metric to a Cost Report and understand how that metric is trending relative to the cost. Technical metrics can be imported automatically through a native integration with Amazon CloudWatch or upload any arbitrary business metric manually via a CSV.
Per Units Costs are available to all users at the time of this blog post being published, including users in the free tier. To begin analyzing unit costs, head to the Business Metrics portion of financial planning, create your first business metric and assign it to a report. To learn more about Per Unit Costs and please read the Per Unit Costs documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today, Vantage is launching Per Unit Costs: The ability to automatically import business metrics from other systems and assign them to specific cost reports in order to track the per unit cost.
Key metrics that may be tracked include revenue, API calls, web requests and queries.
2. Who is the customer?
The customer is any Vantage user who wishes to overlay business metrics on top of cost data in order to track the trend.
3. How much does this cost?
There is no additional cost to using per unit costs.
4. How are per unit costs displayed on a Cost Report?
Per Unit Costs will be displayed as a line on a Cost Report along with a secondary y-axis for this line. You must be viewing a daily, weekly or monthly view in order to see the cost per unit line.
5. Can I have a Budget and Unit Metric applied to the same cost report?
Yes, you can apply both to a Cost Report. They will be displayed along side each other on the report and will be visually distinct.
6. Can I apply multiple Unit Metrics to the same cost report?
Yes, in order to utilize the same Cost Report data across multiple business metrics you can assign as many unit metrics to the same Cost Report as you like.
7. Can the same metric be assigned to multiple Cost Reports?
Yes, you can assign the same metric to multiple reports.
8. What level of RBAC access can import unit metrics?
You must have an “Owner” role in order to import unit metrics. Anyone with “Editor” role and above can assign them to a specific Cost Report.
9. How do I import Business Metrics?
There are different options for importing business metrics. For each import you must specify the aggregation function to be used as these metrics will be aggregated to the day.
Amazon CloudWatch: A specific AWS Account, Region, Namespace, Metric Name and any dimensions. If Vantage does not have a Cross Account IAM Role for this account one will have to be created. You can read more about configuring the CloudWatch import in our documentation.
CSV: You can upload a CSV in a specific 2 column format which can either replace existing data on upload or be used to import new data. You can read about this format in our documentation.
10. If I created an automated import how often is this data imported into Vantage?
This data will be imported and made available daily.
11. Are historical unit metrics supported?
Yes, with automated imports the metrics will be imported for the last 6 months. For manual imports you may supply up to 6 months worth of metrics.
12. How do I assign a business metric to a Cost Report?
After you create and import a business metric you can select a cost report for it to be assigned to along with a scale.
13. What is a unit scale?
A unit scale can be Per Unit, Per Hundred, Per Thousand, Per Million and Per Billion. When adding a business metric to a report you will select the scale. The scale is used to divide the business metric prior to calculating the cost per unit. This allows you to create a Per Unit cost such as “Per Thousand Requests.” If you select Per Unit no division will take place and the base metric number will be used.
14. When you export a Cost Report are the cost per unit also exported?
Exporting costs per unit is not currently supported although it is on our roadmap.
15. How does a date bin affect how the unit metrics are displayed?
Cost per unit will be binned according to the binning of the Cost Report.
