AWS Cost Insights Plugin

The AWS Cost Insights plugin integrates AWS Cost Explorer data directly into your Venue portal. This plugin enables engineering teams to visualize and understand their AWS spending patterns at service and component levels, providing crucial insights for cost optimization and budget management.

AWS Configuration

This configuration deals with AWS users, roles, and policies. While you can create each of these in whichever order you like, we recommend creating a policy first, and then attaching that policy to both roles and users.

Note:

Prerequisites

Create a new policy.
1. Click the Policies in the lefthand navigation options.
2. Click Create policy.
3. Name the new policy something like VenueInsightsPolicy.
4. Add your desired permissions to the policy, including allowances for Cost Explorer Service (full access), IAM service (Limited: List, Read), and Organizations (Limited: List, Read).
Create a new user.
1. Click Users in the lefthand navigation options.
2. Click New user.
3. Name the new user something like costinsights-user.
4. Search for and assign the policy you created in Step 1 to the new user.
5. Click the Security Credentials tab, then click Create access key for a new user.
  Tip:
  Note and save the Access Key and Secret Key, which you'll use later in Venue.sh.
Create a new role.
1. Click the Roles in the lefthand navigation options.
2. Click Create role.
3. Name the new user something like VenueCostInsightsRole.
4. Search for and assign the policy you created in Step 1 to the new role.

Add a trust policy for the new role to assume the newly created user.

Navigate to the new role created in Step 3.
Click the Trust Relationships tab.

Add the following trust policy with your desired user detail:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": { "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:<root | your user here>" },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {}
    }
  ]
}

Permit the new user to assume the newly created role.
1. Navigate to the new user created in Step 2.
2. In the Permissions policies section, click the role you created in Step 3 to open the permissions editor.
3. In the editor, add the following permissions update with your desired role detail:
  { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": "sts:AssumeRole", "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:role/<your role name here>" } ] }

Next, proceed to the next section to configure the AWS Cost Insights plugin in Venue.sh.

Configuring the AWS Cost Insights Plugin in Venue.sh

Note:

Prerequisites

Log in to your desired AWS account in a separate tab or window. You may need to locate and retrieve information to configure the plugin.

In the Venue.sh app, click Plugins in the left-side navigation.
Find AWS Cost Insights, then click Enable Plugin.
Enter the AWS Access Key ID value.
You should have noted and saved this value in Step 2.e in the AWS-configuration task above.
Enter the AWS Secret Access Key value.
You should have noted and saved this value in Step 2.e in the AWS-configuration task above.
Enter the AWS Region value for the region in which you've enabled AWS Cost Insights.
In AWS, the geographic region (or Global if not region-specific) is listed in the banner at the top of the screen.
Enter the AWS Account ID value.
In AWS, the Account ID value is in the upper-right corner of the screen. Click the ID to view a drop-down list of options, then click copy for the Account ID.
Enter the AWS Role Name value.
This role name was created in Step 3 in the AWS-configuration task above.
Click Validate & Enable.
Once the changes save to the database, a new Cost Insights tab appears on the component page, from which you can view cost details.

Tip:

You can also get cost details about AWS resources by using AWS tags in Venue.sh.

If you want to inquire on the cost of a resource, simply add the resource tag from AWS to the entity in your portal when you either import or edit an entity.