AWS Pricing

A Discovery task runs the plugin with an AWS credential from the Pandora FMS credential store and queries the AWS Pricing API for the catalog services and rate codes in scope, and the AWS Cost Explorer API for the enabled cost scopes. The plugin then returns the generated agent and modules for the Discovery task to create.

Catalog price modules are created for each service, region, usage type and rate code, and can be narrowed with rate code and product attribute filters. Cost modules cover yesterday, month to date and the previous calendar month, and the month to date figures can be grouped by service, region and linked account. The cost metric can be set to unblended or amortized cost, and allow and deny patterns refine the generated module names.

Cost figures are cached and refreshed on a configurable interval so the AWS Cost Explorer API is queried at a controlled rate, and the catalog keeps up to 250 price items per service and warns when that limit is reached. The plugin only reads AWS price and cost data and never changes the AWS configuration.

What it allows you to do

- Create a Pandora FMS agent for AWS catalog prices and account costs through a Discovery task.
- Monitor the public unit prices of the selected services by region and rate code.
- Monitor account cost for the previous day, month to date and the previous calendar month.
- Break month to date cost down by service, region and linked account.
- Filter catalog prices by rate code and product attributes, and scope the generated modules with allow and deny patterns.

What it monitors

- Public catalog unit prices per AWS service, region, usage type and rate code
- Account cost for the previous day
- Account cost month to date
- Account cost for the previous calendar month
- Month to date cost by service
- Month to date cost by region
- Month to date cost by linked account

How it works
A Discovery task runs the plugin with an AWS credential from the Pandora FMS credential store. The plugin queries the AWS Pricing API for the catalog services and rate codes in scope and the AWS Cost Explorer API for the enabled cost scopes, and returns one target agent with one module per price and per cost figure for the Discovery task to create. Cost figures are cached and refreshed on a configurable interval, catalog prices can be filtered by rate code and product attributes, and allow and deny patterns refine the generated module names.

Benefits

- AWS public prices and account spend become visible in the same platform as the rest of the monitored infrastructure.
- Removes the manual creation and maintenance of the price and cost modules for each service, region and account.
- New catalog items for the selected services and new billing dimensions are covered on the next task run without reconfiguring the task.
- Price and cost data are consolidated into one view per AWS account scope.

Use cases

- Cloud operations and finance teams that follow the price and the spend of their AWS services.
- Environments where AWS cost is reviewed alongside the rest of the monitored infrastructure.
- Teams that need to detect spend growth by service, region or linked account.

Requirements

- A Pandora FMS server with Discovery enabled and a console to define the task.
- An AWS credential stored in the Pandora FMS credential store, with read access to the AWS Pricing API and the AWS Cost Explorer API.
- The AWS Cost Explorer API enabled in the account when cost modules are needed.
- Network reachability to the AWS endpoints from the system that runs the plugin.
- A target agent group whose identifier is greater than 0 and a monitoring interval for the generated agent.