When considering cost and usage in AWS, it's important to note that Amazon uses two different systems to track spend, and these two systems do not necessarily show the same total.
Kion offers a variety of ways to view your AWS spend.
An AWS invoice (once finalized) tells you the total amount that you need to pay to AWS for your usage. Kion uses this number for all of its calculations to ensure that the values used to control and understand your account can be tied back to real bills from AWS.
For recent usage, AWS generally provides an estimated cost. This cost may be off by a dollar or two but should be close to accurate at the time it was calculated. The issue is that this cost is only updated approximately every 12 hours, and these reports are released hours after the time the calculations are made.
In order to give you more control over your cloud spend, Kion further estimates additional usage since the last AWS report was compiled. This number is updated on an hourly basis until the next AWS report is available, at which point the estimate will project forward from that most recent report's time.
You can navigate to a project's details page to see a breakdown of this spending:
- Reported Spend is based on these Amazon reports and will match the numbers visible in the AWS console's Billing page.
- Credits accounts for any credits applied to your bill by AWS.
- Payer Rounding adjusts bills (usually on the order of a few pennies) to account for rounding across accounts under the same payer.
- Estimated Spend is Kion's estimate of how much spending has occurred since the last report was published.
