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Turn on Cost Insights

Cost Insights shows the cloud costs of your components, read from AWS Cost Explorer. You turn it on, then you tell Astrolabe which AWS account to read.

Before you start​

You need to be an administrator, and to know the ID of your AWS account and the AWS region of Cost Explorer (for example eu-west-1).

🔌 Turn on the plugin​

  1. In the left sidebar, at the bottom, click Administration.

  2. Under PLATFORM, click Plugins.

  3. On the Cost Insights card, click the switch at the top right. It turns on at once.

The card now says Needs configuration. Each component now has a Costs tab. Until Cost Insights is set up, it says Cost Insights is not configured yet, and Administration › Problems lists Cost Insights with Switched on, but not configured yet.

🔧 Enter the settings​

  1. On the Cost Insights card, click Configure.

  2. Fill in the fields:

    FieldWhat to writeExample
    Account IDThe AWS account whose costs are read123456789012
    RegionThe AWS region of the Cost Explorer endpointeu-west-1
    Cost metricThe Cost Explorer metric (optional)UnblendedCost
    Access key ID and Secret access keyLeave both empty to use the credentials of the machine that runs Astrolabe

  3. Click Save. The message Settings saved. appears at the bottom left of the screen and goes away by itself. The line at the top changes from Still waiting for: Account ID, Region to This plugin is configured.

Open a component from Catalog and click its Costs tab: it opens on Total cost, titled Cloud Cost, with a Past 6 Months button. The figures it shows once AWS answers were not checked on a live instance.

Add this annotation to the catalog-info.yaml of the component, with the AWS tag that marks its resources:

metadata:
  annotations:
    aws.amazon.com/cost-insights-tags: Team=platform-team

This step was not checked on a live instance.

✅ That's it!

Next: Common problems with Cost Insights.