Introduction
There are three important things that needs to be stated ahead of this section:
- Thanks to the AWS security mechanisms, you are in full control over what you provide us access with
- We only require the minimum data and information needed to provide the service
- A version of Teevity called Teevity Incognito allows you to run the service on your AWS account, through the AWS Marketplace, without sharing any data with us.
Activating AWS Programmatic Billing
Programmatic Billing is a feature from Amazon that enables AWS users to receive precise data about their usage and cost. It's not very user-friendly since it works by storing CVS and ZIP files in an S3 bucket.
Teevity Cloud Costs Analytics and Teevity Ice as a Service use this (among other things) as their data source for AWS accounts.
IMPORTANT: Programmatic Billing is not retroactive so you have to activate it as soon as you can. Teevity can get you historical cost data via other means but not at the level of detail given by Programmatic Billing.
-
1
Create an S3 bucket for AWS Programmatic Billing
You first need to create the S3 bucket used by the AWS Programmatic Billing. Call it something like <your-company-name>-programmatic-billing (bucket names have to be globally uniques) -
2
Activate AWS Programmatic Billing
Go to the AWS console, on the Billing Preferences page and activate Programmatic Billing. Use the bucket you have just created. -
3
Activate all the other billing services
On the same page, activate all the other billing services (Detailled Billing Report, Detailled Billing Report with resources and tags and Cost allocation report) You're done with the activation of the AWS Programmatic Billing access. There is just one more important step. -
4
IMPORTANT: Add tags to your Cost Allocation Report.
AWS offers an option to split costs according to tags in the Programmatic Billing files. For this to happen, you need to specify which tags have to be included in your Cost Allocation Report. You can do this here
Setting up account
This is only a two steps setup. First, provide the name of the bucket you created for your programmatic billing and the region of that bucket.
