FAQs

Q: Who should use AWS Application Cost Profiler?

AWS Application Cost Profiler is for Product leaders, IT and Finance professionals, and developers running multi-tenant applications. As customers, especially software vendors selling applications, achieve economies of scale through pooled resources across a multi-tenant environment they need mechanism to allocate the cost of shared resources to each tenant per the proportionate usage. Through AWS Application Cost Profiler-provided granular data insights, customers can understand the per tenant cost of shared AWS resource, analyze margins, optimize pricing or perform chargebacks by business unit, or cost center.

Q: What are the benefits of AWS Application Cost Profiler?

Customers can use AWS Application Cost Profiler to track and report cost allocation of shared AWS resources used by multi-tenant software applications. Customers can measure proportionate cost distribution based on data dimensions as applicable to different services. By correlating the usage with billing records through AWS Application Cost Profiler, software vendors can build insights based on customer cost, do margin analysis, identify drivers of infrastructure cost, and build specific price agreement for customers. Customers using shared software application can use AWS Application Cost profiler for chargeback allocation purposes within organization business units or projects.

Q: How do I get started?

You can get started with AWS Application Cost profiler by accessing Application Cost Profiler console. There, you can enable the reports that will be generated based on the metering data collected, and configure the frequency that the report is generated. AWS Application Cost profiler reports are generated with data in the hourly granularity. As a prerequisite to generate AWS Application Cost Profiler reports, you also need to report the tenant meter data in required format and required frequency.

For more information about the AWS Application Cost Profiler, please refer to the documentation here.

Q: How frequently are AWS Application Cost profiler reports generated?

AWS Application Cost profiler reports are generated on a Daily basis. Optionally, customers can also choose to generate report on a Monthly basis.

Q: What tenant metering data is required to generate Application Cost profiler Report?

To generate reports, you need to submit tenant usage data of your software applications that use shared AWS resources. The metering data provides tenant interaction with applications and identifies AWS resources used in a given duration. The tenant usage data can be instrumented through any metering solution of your choice, which then need to be transformed in the required format. The tenant usage data can be provided with aggregation or without aggregation but need to be as a single file for an hour.

For more information about the AWS Application Cost Profiler required format, validations and best practices, please refer the documentation here.

Q: How Tenant Usage Data amendments would be managed?

For any amendments need on tenant usage data reported, you can re-submit the whole file with new amendment changes to consider for re-estimation of proportionate cost breakdown.

Q: How does AWS Application Cost Profiler work with other AWS services?

AWS Application Cost Profiler provides a granular cost insights of AWS resources leveraging AWS Billing information, the datasets which also derive other AWS Cost Management artifacts like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost & Usage Report. AWS Application Cost Profiler is configured and managed from the AWS console and via API. Access to AWS Application Cost Profiler is authenticated by AWS SSO enabling re-use of existing trust relationships between AWS and a customer’s enterprise user directory. The authorization is controlled by AWS IAM, policy control from AWS Organizations, and activities are logged to CloudTrail. AWS Application Cost Profiler data collector is integrated with Amazon S3, empowering customers to easily enable a workload to aggregate and upload tenant usage. AWS Application Cost Profiler can automatically export cost insights report into a customer’s configured S3 bucket.

Q: What does your AWS Application Cost Profiler Service Level Agreement guarantee?

Our SLA guarantees a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.9% for AWS Application Cost Profiler.

Q: How do I know if I qualify for a SLA Service Credit?

You are eligible for a SLA credit for AWS Application Cost Profiler if the service has an Monthly Uptime Percentage of less than 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle. For full details on all of the terms and conditions of the SLA, as well as details on how to submit a claim, please see here.