Comparison
Cost anomaly detectionvsZombie resource
Cost anomaly detection
a job that was accidentally left running was flagged on day two rather than found in the invoice five weeks later.
Automated monitoring for unexpected changes in spend, alerting on a deviation rather than on a threshold. The billing feedback loop is otherwise measured in weeks, which is long enough for a mistake to become a significant number. Routing the alert to the team that owns the resource rather than to finance is what turns it from a report into a fix.
Full entry →Zombie resource
the unattached disks, the reserved addresses and the load balancer for a service deleted last year are all still billing.
Provisioned resources nobody is using and nobody has noticed, typically left behind when something else was deleted. Storage volumes, snapshots, static addresses, idle balancers and old environments are the usual population, and none of them produce an alert because nothing is wrong. Finding them is a query rather than a project, and the tagging discipline that makes the query possible is the actual work.
Full entry →