Workspaces chargeback per user

Question

Is there a recommended way to track how much cost each user is incurring on Workspaces?

One option would to be to create a separate account per client, and host all their users in the account. This would make it easy to track in Cost Explorer. However this doesn't seem like a scalable solution.

Another would be to somehow track individual users in cost and usage reports, but I am not certain if that granularity of information is available in CUR.

Looking for any recommendations. Thank you.

Accepted Answer

If you and your customer is specifically focused on understanding WorkSpaces costs:

WorkSpaces supports the use of billing TAGS:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/tag-workspaces-resources.html

It's quite common for customers to tag each WorkSpace with charge-back identification such as Business, Department, Cost Code and User.

Cost Explorer is a great way to visualize this all and the customer can setup custom Cost Explorer reports filtering or grouping by Service and or TAG:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/cost-alloc-tags.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/ce-what-is.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/ce-filtering.html

If you are looking to make sure your WorkSpaces Fleet is cost optimized, then you should be taking a look at the WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer solution which outputs to a CSV file your actual hourly consumption of each WorkSpace instance along with a recommendation column to convert between AlwaysON <-> AutoStop instances. This tool can go a step further and automate the changing of the WorkSpace run mode on  the fly to ensure that a customers environment is properly cost optimized: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/amazon-workspaces-cost-optimizer/

Workspaces chargeback per user

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