Just curious if anyone has a practical use of Grafana Dashboard 139 – AWS Billing. The graph just climbs and climbs until the end of the month, then drops back to zero and climbs and climbs again until the end of the month (also as depicted in the image example on the dashboard page: AWS Billing dashboard for Grafana | Grafana Labs). I was going to upgrade my Grafana from 6.6.2 to the latest (8.0.6 or something) just so I could use the AWS billing dashboard, but now I don’t see the point really. The dashboard sounded excited at first but now I don’t understand its advantage, especially when I can just log into AWS billing / cost explorer.
Hi, author here. Dashboard started in 2016 and it is showing raw billing metric from the CloudWatch. The point is that you can see how steep are you burning and you can estimate your monthly bill in advance (from revision 16 there is also Cloudwatch math used and daily burning rate is also calculated). My team at that time has had monthly AWS budget, so it was perfect dashboard to track how much money we can still burn. We have had also ICE for more detailed billing and this Grafana dashboard was for quick overview. Also as an user you may have restricted access to AWS billing / cost explorer (for example in the enterprise environment) or user may not have access to AWS account at all. Another point for Grafana dashboard.
Generally, you don’t need any CloudWatch dashboard in the Grafana, because CloudWatch itself offers dashboarding feature now. But engineers usually want to have easy access and option to correlate CloudWatch metrics with other datasources, so there is a point to have it in the Grafana.
If you search forum/internet there are requests from the users to have available also AWS billing / cost explorer metrics in the Grafana. But that is still not supported and it will very likely costs more (on the API request level: AWS Cost Explorer API $0.01/request vs. AWS CloudWatch GetMetricData API $0.01 per 1,000 metrics requested).
1 Like
Perfect @jangaraj – I didn’t take into account other users have no access to AWS billing at all. And even if they do, some higher-ups don’t want to log in to AWS to look, and would rather click a bookmark to get an overview (if anonymous access is enabled on the Grafana dashboard). Thanks for replying! 
This topic was automatically closed after 365 days. New replies are no longer allowed.