Analyzing Your AWS Marketplace Charges
AWS Marketplace charges can be confusing to keep track of and understand. By design, they are separate from your standard Detailed Billing Report (DBR) or Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and are delivered from AWS via a Marketplace DBR or CUR. Additionally, their charges can range from software, promotions, subscriptions, and more. CloudCheckr consolidates all your Marketplace charges into several easy-to-use places, so you can understand them and see how they relate to your entire family of AWS costs.
To access the AWS Marketplace feature:
- Choose Cost > Spend Analysis > Marketplace.
- Select Summary or Details report.
AWS Marketplace Cost Summary
The AWS Marketplace Cost Summary report is useful to give you a quick, searchable overview of your Marketplace charges. You are able to search by date (start/end), cost type (blended/unblended/list), and by AWS account. The results show you a graph of your charges, and a breakdown of cost by Marketplace item. The report can be exported to PDF or CSV.
AWS Marketplace Cost Details
The Cost Details report takes the level of data many steps further. Like the Summary report, you start with an easy set of search options: date, cost, account, but your results also give you all the relevant details for your charges. Your results show the following fields:
- Account: Identifies the AWS account in question.
- AWSMarketPlaceProductName: The product name that has been extracted by CloudCheckr. This helps you understand what you are looking at. In this example, we have purchased the Marketplace version of CloudCheckr.
- Description: This field is the jargon that AWS places in your Marketplace DBR/CUR. It often does not accurately illustrate what you have actually purchased. This is why CloudCheckr extracts the Product Name.
- Resource ID: The ID number for the resource that uses the Marketplace service, when applicable.
- Usage Quantity: A usage number, when applicable.
Using Advanced Grouping To Understand Marketplace Charges
As with many items within CloudCheckr, there is more than one way to look at your data. To take your analysis to the next level, you can use Advanced Grouping to create customizable searches for your Marketplace charges that can be saved and emailed to you at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals.
From the left navigation pane, choose Cost >AWS Billing > Custom Reporting > Advanced Grouping, go to the Group By section, and choose the following groupings:
- Description: The AWS description from the billing file.
- Operation: The AWS operation type from the billing file (such as indicating if a cost is hourly).
- Usage Type: The AWS usage type from the billing file (such as the EC2 instance size).
- Resource ID: The ID number for the resource that uses the Marketplace service, when applicable.
- Tag Key: AWSMarketPlaceProductName: The product name that has been extracted by CloudCheckr.
Advanced Grouping Results
The full results from your Advanced Grouping search will look like your results from AWS Marketplace Cost Details, only with more data. Your results show you exact Marketplace charges, itemized out by operation and usage type, with a clear explanation of their meaning via the AWSMarketPlaceProductName tag. You can take further steps towards organizing your reporting by using Advanced Grouping's Saved Filter functionality, where you can save your search, so that it is constantly updated in the background. You also have the option to be automatically emailed a report on this search on a daily, monthly, or weekly basis, along with a CSV of the exported data.
Click here to learn more about Advanced Grouping.
