I'm exploring options for building a cost monitoring dashboard for my company's AWS account to kick-start our FinOps journey. I want something similar to the cost explorer but with more flexibility to run custom queries that include both AWS costs and application metrics, like ECS expenses. What approaches would work best for achieving this? I've looked into CUR export but would prefer to use CloudWatch for querying instead of Athena.
5 Answers
You might want to check out the official AWS solution for that! They have a guide on cloud intelligence dashboards that could be useful. There are also a lot of third-party tools available if you're looking for more options.
Make sure you have a good tagging strategy in place! It really helps in attributing costs to the right teams or departments. Cost Explorer is great for filtering by tags if you're just starting out. But if you go deeper with analysis, consider some of the other solutions mentioned.
Have you looked into the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard? They have a demo available that might give you some inspiration. It could be a solid starting point for building your dashboard.
If you need CUR queries, there's a massive library with examples for the most common cases. That could help simplify things for you and avoid some of the complexities.
Exporting your data to S3 and then querying with Athena is a common method. But I totally get wanting to use CloudWatch—it's great if you want a more integrated solution. You might look into using the CLI for streamlined queries.

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