Log Service provides the Cost Manager application. After you enable the application, bills are automatically imported to the application. You can view the dashboards of bills in the application. This makes bill analysis more efficient.

Background information

Alibaba Cloud provides highly elastic resources and offers a variety of specifications. You can use the resources at any time based on your business requirements. However, you need to take note of the costs for the resources that you use. Alibaba Cloud provides the pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods. For the bills of pay-as-you-go resources, manual statistical analysis is time-consuming and error-prone. To resolve this issue, Log Service provides the Cost Manager application. You can use this application to collect and sort bills. This makes bill analysis more efficient.

Features

After you enable the application, bills are automatically imported from the billing center to the Logstore that you specify. A bill is a type of time series data. Log Service can collect, store, and analyze time series data in real time. If you use Log Service to analyze bills, you can reduce labor costs for bill analysis by 80%. The Cost Manager application provides the following features:
  • Near-real-time bill collection: The application uploads bills to Log Service within one hour after the bills are generated.
  • Custom dashboards: The application provides a variety of capabilities to meet the requirements for common analysis scenarios and automatically sends reports.
  • Interactive analysis: You can specify query statements to analyze bills. The analysis results are returned in seconds. You can save the query statements into charts on custom dashboards.
  • Visualization: The application displays analysis results in charts, which is more intuitive.
  • Machine learning algorithms: The application forecasts bill trends and identifies unusual bills.
  • Custom alerts: The application supports custom alert settings. This allows you to learn about bill details in real time.
  • Free storage and analysis: You are not charged for the storage and analysis of bills.

Import bills

  1. Log on to the Log Service console.
  2. In the Log Application section, click the Business Analysis tab. Then, click Cost Manager.
  3. In the left-side navigation pane, click Settings.
  4. Import your bill and click Next.
    In the Import Bills step, perform the following operations:
    • Import Alibaba Cloud Bills: If you select this option, bills of all Alibaba Cloud services within the current account are imported to Log Service.
    • First Import of History Bills: If you import a billing history for the first time, you can specify a time range for the billing history.
    • Obtain permissions to access bills: If the current account is not granted the permissions to access bills, you can follow the on-screen instructions to grant the permissions to the account.
  5. Configure a subscription and click Update Resources & Next.
    In the Subscribe to Reports step, configure the following parameters:
    • Frequency: the frequency at which subscribed reports are sent.
    • Add Watermark: If you turn on Add Watermark, bills are watermarked to prevent the leakage of sensitive data.
    • Subscription: If you turn on Subscription, you can subscribe to reports.
    • Notifications: You can select Email or WebHook-DingTalk Bot from the Notifications drop-down list to send subscribed reports. For more information about how to obtain the webhook URL of a DingTalk chatbot, see DingTalk chatbot webhooks.
  6. Optional:Configure alerts and click Complete.
    A new version of the alerting feature is available. You can click Alerts to configure alerts by using the new alerting feature. For more information about the parameters, see Configure an alert monitoring rule in Log Service.

Feature description

After you import bills, you can choose Cost Manager > Introduction in the left-side navigation pane to view an introduction to the Cost Manager application. The introduction includes the description, usage guide, and limits. The descriptions for the fields in bills are also provided.

Custom Analysis

On the Custom Analysis page, you can query and analyze the bills that you import, configure query statements as saved searches, save analysis results as charts on dashboards, and configure alerts.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > Custom Analysis.
  2. On the Custom Analysis page, enter a query statement in the search box to query and analyze the bills that you import.
    You can query and analyze bills in the same manner as you query and analyze logs in a Logstore. For more information, see Query and analyze logs.

Summary

The Cost Manager application provides a built-in Summary dashboard to display overall information about bills. The dashboard displays the fees generated by services within your account in the current month and the fees generated by services within your account over the last three months. The dashboard also displays a forecast trend of fees based on the fees of the current month. You can use the trend chart to plan your budgets. The Summary dashboard functions the same as Log Service dashboards. For more information, see Overview of visualization.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > Summary.
  2. View the bill overview and forecast information.
    Summary

Details

The Cost Manager application provides a built-in Details dashboard to display the bill details and trends of each service, and unusual bills. The Details dashboard functions the same as Log Service dashboards. For more information, see Overview of visualization.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > Details.
  2. View the consumption details of your services.
    Details

Resource Usage Overview

The Resource Usage Overview dashboard displays the number of cloud resources that you use. You can manage the costs of resources by tag or alias.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > Resource Usage Overview.
  2. View charts on the Resource Usage Overview dashboard.
    Cost Manager-001

ECS Instance Bill Analysis

The ECS Instance Bill Analysis dashboard provides a usage overview of ECS instances. You can analyze the bills of ECS instances by region, tag, and alias. We recommend that you use the ECS Instance Bill Analysis dashboard to plan budgets and allocate costs.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > ECS Instance Bill Analysis.
  2. View charts on the ECS Instance Bill Analysis dashboard.
    Cost Manager-002

OSS Bill Analysis

The OSS Bill Analysis dashboard displays the total cost of OSS, cost trends, storage costs of OSS objects for different storage classes, and usage and cost of each billable item. The storage classes include Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive. You can change the storage class that you use based on your business requirements to reduce costs.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > OSS Bill Analysis.
  2. View charts on the OSS Bill Analysis dashboard.
    Cost Manager-003

Log Service Bill Analysis

The Log Service Bill Analysis dashboard displays the total cost of Log Service, cost trends, usage of each billable item, and projects and Logstores that generate the highest fees for storage and index traffic. You can use the dashboard to reduce the cost of Log Service.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cost Manager > Log Service Bill Analysis.
  2. View charts on the Log Service Bill Analysis dashboard.
    Cost Manager-004