You can configure Commander to retrieve AWS billing data. Retrieving billing data improves the accuracy of cost analytics and costing reports, which include metered usage costs such as Storage and Network I/O.
After you configure the AWS report location, billing data is retrieved immediately and a nightly task is scheduled to update the billing records. Any credits in the billing data are accounted for and are displayed as a separate service type in the Cost Analytics page. For more information, see Cost Analytics and Chargeback and IT Costing Reports.
Commander now supports AWS bills in an alternate currency using the currency provided by AWS.
You can retrieve billing data for the following types of AWS billing accounts:
Commander billing data are stored and queried in a universal date without time or time zone. For example, if you are retrieving or injecting billing data for November 30, 2021, Commander interprets this date without any time zone shift, regardless of where you are located. Cost information retrieved from this public cloud provider is split at midnight in the GMT time zone and then stored in Commander with a universal date without time or time zone.
For more information about retrieving AWS billing data, see Set Up Billing Retrieval in AWS and Retrieve AWS Billing Data.
Consolidated billing accounts
You can retrieve AWS billing data for the following consolidated billing accounts:
- Payer accounts — Configured as the payer account in a family of AWS consolidated billing accounts.
- Linked accounts — Linked to a payer account in a family of AWS consolidated billing accounts.
You can retrieve billing data for a payer account on its own, or for a payer account and one or more linked accounts. You can also retrieve billing data for a linked account on its own as long as the linked account has access to the billing report in the S3 bucket.
For more information, see Consolidated Billing for Organizations in the AWS documentation.
GovCloud billing accounts
You can retrieve AWS billing data for GovCloud accounts. GovCloud accounts are associated with a standard account called an Associated Account.
To retrieve billing data for a GovCloud account, both the GovCloud account and its associated account must be added as cloud accounts. For more information, see Add AWS Cloud Accounts.
For more information about GovCloud billing, see AWS GovCloud (US) Billing and Payment.
Billing data for VMs not managed by Commander
Commander also retrieves AWS billing data for VMs that have never been managed by Commander, including charges for:
- VMs that exist only between Commander synchronizations with AWS, such as VMs spawned and torn down by an Auto Scaling Group.
- VMs that existed only before the AWS account was added as a cloud account.
- VMs that existed only when the Commander service was down.
- Existing VMs, including for periods before the AWS account was added as a cloud account.
When a VM not managed by Commander is discovered in the AWS billing report, the following occurs:
- Cost Models are applied to VMs, based on their location in the Infrastructure or Applications tree.
- Ownership information is applied by the Default Ownership policy, or is inherited from the parent auto scaling group or stack.
Because AWS doesn't include the VM's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in the billing report, any Default Ownership policies and cost models targeting VPCs in the Infrastructure tree won't be applied to VMs discovered in the AWS billing report.
Note the following limitations:
- The Default Attributes policy doesn't affect VMs discovered in the AWS billing report.
- Volumes can't be mapped to VMs discovered in the AWS billing report, so storage costs are not included in the Commander billing data for these VMs.
Billing data for all AWS services
When billing data retrieval is configured, Commander's cost analytics data accurately reflects the total cost you'll have to pay on your AWS bill and includes costs for services that Commander doesn't manage. Examples of such services include but are not limited to:
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Simple Storage Service
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon Route 53
On your AWS bill, some of the costs for services may be divided into sub-categories. These sub-categories don't show up in Commander's cost analytics data. Only the total cost for a service is displayed.
Ownership of each service will reflect the ownership policy that you set up on the cloud account, region, or availability zone level.
Monthly charges for AWS support plan fees are listed on the first day of each month. Note that tax isn't listed as a separate service because it's included with each individual service. For example, Virtual Machine has its own tax and RDS has its own tax.
If you configured billing data retrieval in release 6.x, billing for services not managed by Commander will start as soon as you upgrade to release 7.x, but historical billing information won't be available.
AWS Billing Tags
Billing Tags allow you to group and filter your expenses in more detail. You can use these tags to filter expenses in Cost Analytics, the Service Portal Cost Dashboard, and the Cloud Billing Report.
You set up Billing Tags in your AWS account and they are imported when you retrieve billing data. For more information on setting up tags, see Using Cost Allocation Tags.
You can also incorporate Billing Tags into formulas used to create additional line items for cost analytics. For information on using Billing Tags in formulas for Additional Line Items, see Additional Line Items page.
- Before upgrade to 8.1.0, filtering Cost Analytics and the Service Portal Cost Dashboard by Custom Attributes affected the Recommendations. After upgrade, filtering by Billing Tags won't affect the Recommendations.
- Billing Tags and SKUs will only be retrieved from Version 8.1 and forward, unless billing records are reset. Create a case through the Snow Support Portal if you would like to perform this activity.