FAQs
Q: How up-to-date is the data in CloudKeeper Lens?
A: CloudKeeper Lens uses data from the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), which is typically delayed by up to 2 days and is not real-time. To see the exact date and time of the latest data refresh, you can visit the main Billing Summary dashboard. The timestamp is displayed prominently above the Cost Insights widget, giving you a clear indication of the data's freshness.
For the Hourly Dashboards, the data can be stale for up to 4 days. This is important to remember when analyzing very recent cost changes.
Q: What is a Multi-Account View (MAV)?
A: A MAV (Multi-Account View) is a logical grouping of your AWS accounts within CloudKeeper. It allows you to manage, monitor, and report on a specific set of accounts from a single, unified interface, simplifying cost management and visibility across your organization.
Q: How does the Cost Explorer in Lens differ from the native AWS Cost Explorer?
A: The Lens Cost Explorer offers enhanced filtering and, most importantly, provides resource-level details for the entire duration of your engagement with CloudKeeper. AWS typically provides this level of detail for only the last 14 days (often at an extra charge). This allows for deeper and more historical analysis without additional fees.
Q: What are the benefits of using the Hourly Dashboards?
A: The Hourly Dashboards provide an hour-by-hour breakdown of usage, visualized as a heatmap. This helps you spot peak usage times, identify idle periods, and verify if your applications are scaling down during off-peak hours. This granular view is also useful for making data-driven decisions about purchasing Reserved Instances or Savings Plans by identifying a consistent "baseline" hourly spend.
Q: How does Lens generate cost-saving recommendations?
A: Recommendations are generated based on your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data. Lens analyzes your usage patterns to suggest optimizations like moving to lower-cost instances, removing idle resources, or leveraging different storage classes. Because they are based on the CUR, these recommendations are not real-time, and you should always validate them against your actual resource utilization before taking action.
Q: How does Lens calculate Reservation Coverage differently from AWS?
A: Lens measures reservation coverage in monetary value ($), showing the actual dollar amount of your On-Demand spend that is covered by reservations. AWS calculates coverage based on usage hours, which can be misleading as it treats an hour of a small instance the same as an hour of a large, expensive one. The Lens approach gives you a more accurate picture of the true financial impact and effectiveness of your RI and Savings Plan portfolio.
Q: How can I track costs for a specific project or team across multiple AWS accounts?
A: You can use the Tags Management and Reports features. First, create a cost allocation tag (e.g., project) in the Preferences section and associate it with all relevant MAVs (accounts). Lens will then automatically group all resources with that tag key across those accounts. You can then generate a consolidated report to see the total spend for each tag value (e.g., project-alpha, project-beta), including a section for any untagged resources.
Q: What is the difference between the CloudKeeper bill and AWS Cost Explorer?
A: We go aggressive on reservations on the customer's behalf. The customer has the flexibility to run on-demand, whereas we bear the risk to utilize those reservations. Also, the reservation charges get deducted from our main account, but the reservations are applied to the customer accounts. This is why the costs appear lower in Cost Explorer.
Q: Where can I see the reservations that I bought?
A: You can view the reservations and Savings Plans on the Reservations Dashboard in Lens itself. If your contract allows buying reservations, you can also buy new reservations from the CloudKeeper Lens console. We recommend you get in touch with us at support@cloudkeeper.com to get recommendations related to new RIs and SPs.
Q: Fixed budget alerts vs Relative budget alerts?
A: Fixed Budget Alerts – Trigger when spending exceeds a specific dollar amount you set for each budget period. Example: Alert if spend > $5,000 in a month.
Relative Budget Alerts – Trigger when spending exceeds a percentage change compared to a previous period, over a set number of days. Example: Alert if spend increases by more than 20% compared to the last 7 days.