Application Cost Profiler

Question

Hello. We are working on a multi-tenant SaaS application and are looking into possible ways to attribute the cost of shared resource to our customers. The main services we are using are Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, DynamoDB. Lambdas, S3 and SQS. We have been playing with Application Cost profiler, but the documentation is not very clear on how to set this up. Is there a detailed walthrough or tutorial available that also shows us how we can use the results data set? Or should we look at a completely different solution for another provider? Cost profiler does not seem to cover many AWS services.

vmueller · Accepted Answer

Application Cost Profiler is a very cost efficient tool to get you started when you are trying to separate costs in a multi-tenant environment. As of today it only covers a small subset of AWS services (Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and DynamoDB), but it will hopefully be able to be integrated with many others. While the documentation provides clear steps on how to set up Application Cost Profile, it could probably be a bit more descriptive on how to actually use it, once it is configured.
But there are a couple of blogs out there that can help you to get started:
* **Introducing AWS Application Cost Profiler**: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/introducing-aws-application-cost-profiler-offering-user-based-cost-data-of-shared-aws-resources/
* **Using AWS X-Ray and AWS Application Cost Profiler**: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/using-aws-x-ray-and-aws-application-cost-profiler-to-track-tenant-cost-of-shared-aws-infrastructure/

as well as a comprehensive Application Cost Profiler workshop, that not only helps you configuring ACP in your account, but also creates a private API Gateway to receive usage information, EventBridge rules and Lambda functions to create the input data and kick off the reports creation.
* **Application Cost Profiler workshop**: https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/094c4013-80fe-47a1-89de-addf99823b72/en-US

But as mentioned in the beginning, Application Cost Profiler covers only few AWS services at the moment, and you might have to look outside of AWS to get coverage for all your resources. CloudZero offers visibility into unit costs and cost per customer, something that you might want to check out.

* **CloudZero**: https://www.cloudzero.com/solutions/cost-per-customer

Application Cost Profiler

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