Published by Greg Campion
Last updated on January 23, 2024
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4 minute read
Do you use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for anything, anything at all really? If so, you’ve likely had a bill or two be much more costly than expected. Or maybe you’ve just paid them without actually knowing if they were way too expensive! It’s almost like they want you to overspend.
iAmazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. In aggregate, these cloud computing web services provide a set of primitive abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools. Read more ...
In Amazon CloudWatch you can set up an alarm to notify you when an account is over a specific amount. But when you are running many accounts with something like AWS organizations, or if you want historical data about when your costs increased, you have to go into the Cost Explorer and fumble around with the relatively unintuitive interface, or set up an alarm for every single account.
Hmm... if only there were a better way...
Introducing the AWS cost sensor in PRTG!
We use AWS’s API to grab the most recent data about your account, including what your costs are forecasted to be for the month and year, so you can set up alarms on the forecasts before your costs get out of control. Also, if seeing blended and non-blended costs at a glance is helpful for you, those are made available in the sensor as well.
The costs are updated in AWS a few times a day, so the default scanning interval for this sensor is 6 hours. We try to check the API as often as makes sense, so you stay up to date—especially for when someone ‘accidentally’ spins up an x1e.32xlarge instance just for fun (they only cost $26,688 / hour) ;)
A few small things to note about this sensor: Each time the API is called, it costs that AWS account 6 US-cent. To avoid generating costs for you, we don't create the sensor automatically with the Auto-discovery function in PRTG. This means you will need to create the sensor by hand. Find out all about the AWS Cost Sensor in our manual or within your PRTG installation.
Your feedback is appreciated!
Let us know if you are already using this new sensor and if not, go check it out and give us some feedback. This sensor is still in Beta and we are hoping to make it better based on the information you give us!
You there!
