Recently i discovered my bill raising without using anything above free tier of with very minor charges.
On the bill management page it was clear that the charges are coming from CloudWatch Alarms as you can see in the picture below.
My question is why and how can i stop them? I can see that the alarms are been created by DynamoDB
auto-scaling, but i can't continue being charged for such a simple thing, i'm sure there is an option to disable it but i can't figure out.
Edited I checked "hide auto-scaling alarms" box but i think it's not the fix, fingers crossed to be:P
This is part of DynamoDB AutoScaling. For a small project, you should consider using DynamoDB without Provisionned Throughput.
AWS Free Tier includes 10 Alarm metrics (not applicable to high-resolution alarms).
See How can I determine why I was charged for CloudWatch usage, and then how can I reduce future charges?
Related
I am trying to figure out how to simply view all of our custom metrics in CloudWatch.
AWS Console is far from helpful, or at least it's not well signposted. I want to try and relate our CloudWatch bill to actual metrics we have to try and determine where I can make some cuts.
For Example:
Our Bill shows 1,600 Metrics charged at $0.30 a piece per month, but I see over 17,000 custom namespaces in the metrics list within the CloudWatch console.
Does anyone know how I can best find this information, or have a nice handy CLI command to view all custom metrics for a region?
I can see the custom namespaces section in cloud watch, but these don't really marry up to the billing page as such. By about a 10 fold.
Thank you.
UPDATE:
I think I may have identified why there is a discrepancy between the billing and the list of metrics:
We have namespace builds, each creating metrics and being destroyed sometimes within hours.
These metrics which were created linger for 15 days according to the AWS FAQ on CloudWatch Metrics.
The overall monthly metrics seemingly is a figure of what it is due to the concurrency of metrics over the month.
However, this still doesn't make the billing breakdown any easier to understand when you're trying to highlight possible outliers in costs.
Im learning about AWS for a subject in the university.
About 20 days ago I started to learn about Elasticsearch because I need querys that DynamoDB can't do.
I'm trying to use only the Free Tier and I created some domains, put data through Lambda (like 100 KiB) and then deleted it.
Then I checked the Billing and I realized that 4.9GB has been used for EBS storage. The Free Tier provide 10GB per month but the problem is that I don't know how I used all that storage and if there is a way to limit it because I dont want to exceed the usage limits.
I will be grateful for any kind of explanation or advice to not exceed the limit.
I'm unaware with preventive step which can restrict your billing.
However, using Cloudwatch billing alarm, you'd be notified immediately as soon as it breaches billing threshold.
Please have look at here for detailed AWS documentation on it.
It looks like custom metrics will be kept for 15 months, if I understand it correctly, since they get aggregated to higher resolution, according to https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/faqs. Does it mean we have to pay for at least 15 months once we create a custom metric?
I have CloudWatch agent installed to collect various metrics using user_data. It creates new metrics for every new instances. After running many tests, I have more than 6,000 custom metrics, but most of them are unused. Since there is no way to delete custom metrics, do I get charged for those unused metrics until they expire (15 months)? I hope I'm wrong on this :]
Please clarify how we get charged for unused custom metrics.
You will not get charged for those. You will get charged for the metric for the duration you publish data onto them. It's not very clear on the CloudWatch pricing page but they hint it in the [original pricing reduction blogpost]{https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-price-reduction-cloudwatch-custom-metrics/).
You will get charged though on the retrieval of those (API costs).
we have the same issue to resolve. waiting for clearification from aws
I am currently signed up to the free tier of AWS. I am enjoying experimenting with various services including those not affording by said free tier. Can AWS's enhanced budgets be used to stop services like EC2 instances if I accidentally spend too much? Or do they merely act as alerts?
This is available for EC2, I don't think it is available for all of the AWS resources.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/UsingAlarmActions.html
Hope it helps.
There are several posts which looks it from different perspectives, such as this and this.
Having a cost cap might be a crucial requirement based on the usage, especially when considering how complex it is to set the things up properly and keeping everything secure on the cloud for an average user. At least we can expect to have a feature to switch on/off a cost-cap service, so a user can decide their own scenario easily.
Closest solution that I found is here:
Serverless Automated Cost Controls
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/serverless-automated-cost-controls-part1
It explains how to trigger AWS Lambda function to change IAM permission from EC2FullAccess to EC2ReadOnly when the budget exceeds the limit.
There is no built-in way to terminate services based on budgets or billing alarms.
You can get notified automatically, but it is then up to you to determine how to handle it.
Would you really want AWS automatically terminating your production infrastructure because you went $1 over your estimated monthly spending?
Edit: There is now a way to monitor and alert on free tier usage, and when your predicted usage will exceed the free tier. See here for details. You could probably come up with a way to terminate infrastructure based on an alert using SNS & lambda.
Edit 2: In Oct. 2020, AWS released Budget Actions - the ability to trigger an action when a budget thresholds are reached. This should give you the ability to automate a response - you can shut down servers, change IAM permissions to prevent additional infrastructure from being created, etc.
Recently, Amazon has given "budget action" to carry out actions like stop services automatically if the budget has exceeded.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/announcing-aws-budgets-actions/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/budgets-controls.html#:~:text=select%20Configure%20thresholds.-,To%20configure%20a%20budget%20action,-Under%20Configure%20thresholds
I was attracted by the AWS free tier to give EC2/S3 a try. However, one thing I'm worried about is the payment process. There's quite a few management menus and it doesn't seem entirely transparent when I would break the free usage tier (or if I decide to pay, when I break that usage tier).
You can download .csv usage reports, but I wish the billing/usage monitoring was a little more interactive so I don't get unpleasantly surprised. Does anyone have experiences EC2, is there some aspect of the management interface that makes this a easier/less worrisome?
You can monitor your AWS resource usage and the resulting fees here:
AWS Account Activity
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/
You can see how current the report is at the top. In my experience it lags by a few hours, which is pretty amazing if you think of how many different customers AWS has and how many little things they have to keep track of to calculate your fees (e.g., every disk I/O request and network byte sent).
Click "Expand All Services" to see the usage/fees broken down even more.
Note: You don't "decide to pay". You already gave AWS your credit card and agreed to pay according to their fee structure. If your resource usage goes over the free tier, AWS will automatically charge your credit card at the end of the month. Monitor the above page regularly to make sure your charges are accumulating as expected.
Use AWS Billing Alerts to notify when you exceeds the fee tier,
If you currently use the AWS Free Tier, you can set a billing alert to notify you if you exceed the free tier by setting a threshold of $0.00.
refer to,
AWS Billing Alerts