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Spend Overviews

Spend Overviews provide a comprehensive analysis of your AWS account spending, offering visibility into cost trends, service usage patterns, and overall spending health. These overviews are available for all SpendShrink users, including free tier subscribers.

Accessing Spend Overviews

To access Spend Overviews:

  1. Navigate to your AWS Accounts page
  2. Select an AWS account from your list of connected accounts
  3. Click on "Spend Overview" in the account's navigation menu
  4. The overview page will load automatically with your account's spending data

Key Components

The Spend Overview page includes several key components designed to give you immediate visibility into your AWS spending:

Summary Cards

At the top of the page, you'll find summary cards displaying:

  • Current Month-to-Date Spend: Your total AWS spending for the current month so far
  • Monthly Forecast: Projected spending for the entire month based on current usage patterns
  • Previous Month Total: Your complete spending for the previous month
  • Month-over-Month Change: Percentage and dollar amount change compared to the previous month

The main spending trends chart visualizes:

  • 12-Month Historical Spend: View spending patterns over the past year
  • Monthly Breakdowns: Identify seasonal patterns and spending trends
  • Service Coloring: See how different AWS services contribute to your overall costs

Top Services

This section highlights:

  • Highest-Cost Services: Identifies which AWS services are consuming the most budget
  • Percentage of Total: Shows what proportion of your bill each service represents
  • Month-over-Month Changes: Indicates which services are increasing or decreasing in cost

Regional Breakdown

The regional breakdown shows:

  • Cost by AWS Region: View which geographical regions host your most expensive resources
  • Percentage Distribution: Understand the regional distribution of your cloud footprint
  • Cost Trends: Identify regions with changing cost patterns

Available Overview Cards

The Spend Overview page includes a variety of specialized cards, each focusing on different aspects of your AWS spending:

Account Overview

Provides a high-level summary of your account's spending metrics and patterns, including month-to-date costs and trend indicators.

Month-to-Date Cost

Displays your current month's spending so far with a comparison to previous periods, helping you track how spending is progressing throughout the month.

EC2 Instance Costs

A comprehensive breakdown of EC2 instance costs including running and stopped instances, storage costs, and instance details. This card includes both a chart showing historical EC2 cost trends and a detailed table of individual instances.

DB Instance Costs

Similar to the EC2 card, this provides a comprehensive breakdown of database instance costs across different database services, including instance types, storage costs, and usage details.

S3 Overview

Offers a detailed view of S3 storage usage, costs, and trends across different storage classes and buckets, helping you understand your data storage costs.

Data Transfer Overview

Shows data transfer costs and patterns across regions and services, highlighting where network traffic costs are accumulating.

Top Expenses Last Month

Provides a visual breakdown of the highest spending services from the previous month in a donut chart format for easy comparison.

Total Cost Trend

Displays the trend of total costs over time with key metrics and patterns, helping you identify seasonal or unexpected changes in your spending.

RDS Instance Cost Breakdown

Offers a detailed breakdown of RDS instance costs including instance types, storage, and backups, showing how your database costs are distributed.

Service Breakdown

Shows cost distribution across different AWS services in a well-organized visualization, helping you understand which services are consuming most of your budget.

Top Expenses Current Month

Similar to the Last Month card, this shows a visual breakdown of the highest spending services in the current month-to-date.

ECR Repositories Overview

Provides details about your ECR repository usage, costs, and storage metrics, helping you manage container image storage costs.

EKS Cluster Costs

Shows a detailed breakdown of costs associated with EKS clusters and related resources, helping you understand your Kubernetes-related spending.

Last Month Total

Summarizes your previous month's total costs with comparison metrics to earlier periods.

Anomaly Detection

Identifies and displays cost anomalies and unusual spending patterns, highlighting potential issues that need attention.

Costs Per Region

Breaks down your costs across different AWS regions in a visual format, helping you understand your geographical distribution of cloud resources.

Current Month Forecast

Projects your costs for the current month based on usage patterns, helping you anticipate your month-end bill.

Current Month Total

Shows the running total of costs for the current month with trend indicators and comparisons.

Database Services Cost Chart

Provides a visual representation of costs across different database services, helping you understand how your database spending is distributed.

Analysis Features

The Spend Overview includes several analytical features to help you understand your AWS spending better:

Month-over-Month Comparisons

Compare current spending with previous months to identify trends and anomalies:

  • Service-Level Comparisons: See how usage of specific services has changed
  • Percentage Changes: Quickly identify significant shifts in spending patterns
  • Trend Indicators: Visual indicators show whether costs are increasing or decreasing

Anomaly Detection

SpendShrink automatically analyzes your spending patterns to detect unusual activity:

  • Spending Spikes: Identify sudden increases in spending
  • Unusual Service Usage: Detect when services show unexpected cost patterns
  • Visual Indicators: Anomalies are highlighted directly on spending charts

Forecast Accuracy

Understand how reliable your spending forecasts are:

  • Historical Forecast Performance: See how accurate previous forecasts have been
  • Confidence Intervals: Understand the potential range of your month-end bill
  • Forecast Adjustments: Learn how forecast accuracy improves throughout the billing cycle

Using Spend Overviews Effectively

Identifying Cost Drivers

Use the overview page to identify your main cost drivers:

  1. Review the Top Services section to see which services consume the most budget
  2. Examine regional distribution to understand geographical cost centers
  3. Study month-over-month changes to see which services are growing in cost

Spotting Optimization Opportunities

The overview provides indicators of potential optimization opportunities:

  1. Look for services with sudden cost increases that might indicate inefficiencies
  2. Identify regions with unexpectedly high costs that might benefit from consolidation
  3. Pay attention to anomaly indicators that might point to misconfigured resources

Regular Monitoring Cadence

For effective cost management, we recommend:

  • Daily Quick Checks: Glance at the month-to-date and forecast cards
  • Weekly Service Reviews: Examine top services and regional distribution changes
  • Monthly Trend Analysis: Review the full 12-month history to identify long-term patterns
  • Savings Opportunities: After reviewing your overview, check Savings Opportunities for specific cost-saving recommendations
  • Spend Insights: Dive deeper into specific service usage details for more granular analysis
  • Spend Alerts: Set up alerts based on trends observed in your overview to stay proactive about cost management

Data Freshness

  • The overview page data is refreshed daily and cached for 24 hours for efficiency
  • Month-to-date figures are generally accurate within 24 hours
  • Historical data for completed months is considered final and complete
  • The most recent 24-48 hours of data may be incomplete due to AWS reporting delays