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Why aren't the tags for my Lightsail instance working with reports?

0

I have a Lightsail instance that is not correctly showing up in my reports. One tag is the standard "Name" tag, and the other is a cost allocation tag. These tags are working with all my other services except my Lightsail instance.

Goal/Objective

I want to create a report that shows expenses for services, grouped by the cost allocation tags.

Tags

I have two tags on the Lightsail instance:

  1. The "Name" tag. This has successfully populated the Name field/label in reports for everything except this Lightsail instance.
  2. The "organizational-unit" tag, which is a cost allocation tag,

Screenshot #1 shows that I've tagged the instance in question. I'm using these same tags for other assets.

The cost allocation tag (organizational-unit) has been enabled and is successfully reporting costs for all other assets/services except for this Lightsail instance. In the reports, this is showing up as No cost category: Organizational Unit

Reports / Examples of tags not working for Lightsail

I have three reports that I've set up which are not working correctly with the Lightsail tags:

1. A Cost Explorer report that groups by the organizational-unit tag

Screenshot #2 shows this report. The $1.74 is the Lightsail instance (confirmed in a report that doesn't use the cost allocation tag). This should be grouped under the red category, and not the blue category marked as No cost category: Organizational Unit

2. A Cost Explorer report that groups by the cost category

Screenshot #3 shows this report. It's similar to the first report, except that it uses a Cost Category to group the results. The Cost Category uses the same organizational-unit tag to group the resources, but the results in the report are incorrect, exactly like the first report that uses the tags.

3. A Resource Group report based on the organizational-unit tag

Screenshot #4 shows the Resource Group used in the second report. What's notable is that the "Name" tag for the Lightsail instance isn't populated here either. This leads me to believe it's an issue with Lightsail tags, since the Name for the other resources are populated here. Screenshot #1 shows that the tags are populated on the Lightsail instance.

What I've tried so far

  1. I've set up the cost allocation tags and let them propagate (for more than 24 hours)
  2. Read the documentation. I don't see anything explaining why my tags shouldn't work
  3. Removing the tags from the Lightsail instance, re-tagging the Lightsail instance , and waiting a day to see if it populates correctly
  4. Waiting and recreating the reports. It's been several days/nearly a week now.

Screenshots

Screenshot #1

Screenshot 1

Screenshot #2

Screenshot 2

Screenshot #3

Screenshot 3

Screenshot #4

Screenshot 4

I've tried everything I can think of and read the documentation, but I'm stumped. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Topics
Cloud Financial ManagementCompute
Tags
AWS Cost ExplorerAmazon Lightsail
Language
English

asked a year ago229 views

2 Answers
0

Hi,

In your fourth screenshot, where you have a textbox stating "This is the Lightsail instance not being reported correctly", the Resource type in column#3 of the table is Distribution

I think that charge is from your Lightsail Distribution and not your Lightsail Instance. You likely need to tag your Lightsail Distribution with the Name and organizational-unit tag keys for that charge to get categorized correctly.

Thanks.

AWS
EXPERT

answered a year ago

  • ucmweb
    a year ago

    Hi. Thank you for looking into this.

    You're right about screenshot #4. That is the distribution and not the instance. I didn't catch that. I can add the "Name" tag to the distribution and that should fix the label (which I've now done, thank you). However, that won't address the issue with the instance not being reflected on the cost report.

    The distributions in Lightsail seem to be managed/contained within the Lightsail service (Not CloudFront). I had already tagged the Lightsail distribution with the organizational-unit tag, but that hasn't been showing up on the cost report either.

    Your suggestion about tagging the instance makes sense, but I've already done that in screenshot #1. The two tags you see there (values are commented out for privacy/security) are attached to the instance, not the distribution.

    I'm still stumped. I'd like to think that the tagging in Lightsail isn't broken, but I can't seem to convince myself otherwise.

  • AWS-SUM EXPERT
    a year ago
    1. In your screenshot#4, the Region is Virginia, while the Region of your Lightsail instance is Oregon, so this is why the Lightsail Instance doesn't show up in your Resource Group search. If you perform the same search in Oregon, does the Lightsail instance show up? This should confirm if the tag key is same (no extra spaces/typo/etc). It would be more helpful if your have any other resource that is in Region Oregon, is tagged with organizational-unit, shows up in Cost Explorer and also shows up in Resource Group search -> because if Lightsail Instance shows up alongside it in Resource Group, then the tag key will be verified to be same.
    2. The Lightsail Distribution tagged with organizational-unit may be in its free first year and hence have no charge and hence not be showing up in Cost Explorer. In your bill is there any charge for a Lightsail Distribution plan?
    3. In screenshot#2, the amount $1.74 cannot all be from the Lightsail instance of 2GB-RAM plan whose monthly charge being $12, daily cost should be around $0.40. So the charge is likely from other bill items some of which may not support cost allocation tags, for example, DataTransfer charges. Do you have any of these? Or they could also be from other resources that are potentially not tagged or do not support tags. Do you have any such resources?
    4. If you change your Cost Explorer dimension to Service instead of tag, filter by Lightsail, can you find the usage types that sum up to $1.74?
-1

There are a few potential reasons why your Lightsail instance tags aren't working properly with your cost reports:

  1. Cost Categories and Historical Data: Cost categories only apply to data from the time they were created moving forward. They don't retroactively categorize historical data. If you created the cost category after the Lightsail instance was already running, older cost data won't be categorized properly.

  2. Tag Inheritance for Snapshots: If you created your Lightsail instance from a snapshot that was created using the AWS CLI, API, or SDKs, the tags would not have been automatically inherited. Snapshots created through these methods require manually specifying tags from the source resource using the tags parameter.

  3. Time Delay for Tag Processing: After creating or modifying cost allocation tags, it can take up to 24 hours for your usage records to be updated with the new values. While you mentioned waiting several days, there could still be processing delays specific to Lightsail.

  4. Tag Activation Requirements: For cost allocation tags to work, they need to be both applied to the resource AND activated in the Billing and Cost Management console. Double-check that your "organizational-unit" tag is properly activated for cost allocation.

  5. Service-Specific Limitations: Some AWS services might have limitations on tag-based cost allocation. Lightsail might handle tags differently than other AWS services.

To troubleshoot further:

answered a year ago

  • ucmweb
    a year ago

    I've checked all this. Still having the same problem.

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