AWS Budgets Dashboard

Introduction

AWS Budgets is a service that helps customers plan and track their cloud spending across AWS services. It allows customers to set custom budgets for their AWS costs and usage, enabling better financial management and control over their AWS resources.

This dashboard gives you a clear, hierarchical view of your organization’s budgets, from the top-level down to individual departments and applications. Now, you can easily track budgeted, forecasted, and actual spend all in one place. With customizable visualizations and real-time insights, you’ll be empowered to make informed, data-driven decisions that drive strategic alignment and optimization. Identify areas for improvement, forecast future needs, and ensure your financial resources are being used efficiently.

Demo Dashboard

Get more familiar with Dashboard using the live, interactive demo dashboard following this link

Tagging and Hierarchy

Using tags with AWS Budgets adds a powerful layer of organization and flexibility to the budgeting process. Tags are key-value pairs that customers can attach to AWS resources as metadata. When applied to budgets, tags allow customers to:

1. Organize budgets hierarchically: Customers can create a tag structure that mirrors their organizational hierarchy, such as department/team/project.

2. Represent their financial structure: Tags can reflect a company’s cost centers, business units, or other financial divisions.

3. Create granular budgets: Set up budgets for specific projects, applications, or environments using relevant tags.

4. Improve cost allocation: Easily track and allocate costs to the appropriate business units or projects based on tags.

5. Enhance reporting: Generate more detailed and meaningful reports by filtering and grouping budget data using tags.

By leveraging tags with AWS Budgets, customers can create a more organized and insightful budgeting system that aligns with their organization’s structure and financial practices (refer the below diagram). This approach provides greater visibility into AWS spend and helps make more informed decisions about resource allocation and cost optimization.

This Dashboard shows budgets with a specific tag key cid:budget-level.

Prerequisites

1. Deploy or update Data Collection Lab and make sure Budgets and Organization Data collection modules are enabled. Version 3.0.3 or higher required.

2. Tagging your budgets enables the option of introducing hierarchy within the organizational budgets. To achieve this, we recommend to set the tags with a key value pair as below:

   Key: cid:budget-level
   Value: Organization

Deployment

CloudFormation

Note

Prerequisite: To install this dashboard using CloudFormation, you need to install Foundational Dashboards CFN with version v4.0.0 or above as described here

1. Log in to to your Data Collection Account.

2. Click the Launch Stack button below to open the pre-populated stack template in your CloudFormation.

   

3. You can change Stack name for your template if you wish.

4. Leave Parameters values as it is.

5. Review the configuration and click Create stack.

6. You will see the stack will start in CREATE_IN_PROGRESS. Once complete, the stack will show CREATE_COMPLETE

7. You can check the stack output for dashboard URLs.

   Note

   Troubleshooting: If you see error "No export named cid-CidExecArn found" during stack deployment, make sure you have completed prerequisite steps.

Command Line

Alternative method to install dashboards is the cid-cmd tool.

1. Log in to to your Data Collection Account.

2. Open up a command-line interface with permissions to run API requests in your AWS account. We recommend to use CloudShell.

3. In your command-line interface run the following command to download and install the CID CLI tool:

   pip3 install ---upgrade cid-cmd

4. In your command-line interface run the following command to deploy the dashboard:

   cid-cmd deploy --dashboard-id aws-budgets

   Please follow the instructions from the deployment wizard. More info about command line options are in the Readme or cid-cmd --help.

Update

Please note that dashboards are not updated with update of CloudFormation Stack. When new version of the dashboard template is released, you can update your dashboard by running the following command in your command-line interface:

cid-cmd update --dashboard-id aws-budgets

Troubleshooting

Column "optimization_data.budgets_data.tags" cannot be resolved

If you see this issue on deployment please make sure you have updated the Data Collection stack to the version required on Prerequisites.

Authors

• Mohideen Hajamohideen, Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Architect

• Marco De Bianchi, Sr. Cloud & FinOps Architect

Contributors

• Iakov Gan, Senior Solution Architect

• Yuriy Prykhodko, Principal Technical Account Manager

Feedback & Support

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Note

These dashboards and their content: (a) are for informational purposes only, (b) represents current AWS product offerings and practices, which are subject to change without notice, and (c) does not create any commitments or assurances from AWS and its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS content, products or services are provided "as is" without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or implied. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.