Earlier this week Amazon added a new important capability to its CloudWatch– Monitor Estimated Charges Using Billing Alerts. The new feature facilitates the way you can control your on-going costs.

AWS CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS services. CloudWatch exposes operational metrics for Network, CPU, Disk, etc., for EC2  instances, EBS volumes, and other cloud resources. CloudWatch also allows users to import their own metrics and monitor them through the same interface.

CloudWatch allows users to chart the data (two weeks old historical data available), set alarms on thresholds (and receive notifications on them), and control AWS Auto Scaling. Amazon AWS cloud users interact with CloudWatch through the command-line, API, or AWS Web Console.

The New Feature

The new feature is a new set of metrics that can be monitored through CloudWatch, that bring user’s billing information. These new metrics provide an estimate of AWS charges up to the current time: total charges, per-service charges, per-account charges, per-account-and-service charges. All these metrics are to-date estimates of cost, no prediction metric is provided.

As any other CloudWatch metric, users can access this data through the same interfaces (command-line, API, and web console), and use them for alarms/notifications and auto scaling control.

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How does it affect cloud cost monitoring tools?

Cost monitoring tools tell you how much and for what cloud resources you’re paying, and now CloudWatch can tell you that too – now AWS users can receive the estimate of their to-date charges from AWS Web Console and API.  It’s important to note that what CloudWatch now provides is raw data, with low granularity. Cost monitoring tools still add value by providing a better granularity both for the cost/resource information and for the alarms/notifications (if they provide such services). Part of the data they use for that can come from AWS APIs, so probably the new data will also be captured from the API and factored into their cost monitoring results.

How does Newvem Analytic engine utilize this new feature?

Monitoring tools tell you what you are being charged, Newvem completes this picture by helping you know if you are  spending  effectively, in  line with your business goals. Newvem answers this question by looking at data retrieved from AWS API (as well as billing and usage information available from AWS account activity web pages), The new metrics coming from this announcement actually enrich the gathered data used for Newvem’s analysis. Newvem’s Spending analytics also validate that the charges reported indeed corresponds to the consumed resources, so having this information handy and part of CloudWatch is a great improvement to this workflow.

Newvem applauds Amazon for listening to its customers and its eco-system and contionusly offering more and better functionality enhancing cloud adoption.

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• Hourly Utilization Pattern Analysis 
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Earlier in his career Zev managed several business units at Oracle and later led several successful startups, including Aduva which was acquired by Sun MicroSystems and Tradeum which was acquired by VerticalNet.

Keywords: AWS cloud, cloud adoption, cloudwatch, monitor estimated charges, EC2  instances, EBS volumes, AWS Auto Scaling, cloud cost monitoring, AWS Web Console and API, newvem coud analytic.

Pic Credits:http://www.cloudave.com/8480/amazon-cloudwatch-offers-interesting-new-features