Get AWS costs posted directly to Slack | Hacker News Reader

Get AWS costs posted directly to Slack

vantage.sh

104 pointsStratusBen44 comments

Hi everyone, I'm Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage

We've heard consistently from existing users that they want visibility of AWS costs directly where their teams do work: which tends to be in Slack for the most part. This integration represents us dipping our toes into an integration with Slack. Currently you can get either daily, weekly or monthly cost reports posted to Slack with a breakdown of each individual AWS service.

In the future, we're looking to integrate Slack slash commands in for querying information about your AWS account as well as comparing information found on http://ec2instances.info/ which we acquired earlier this year. We've also got some things cooking around automated alerts and cost anomaly detections.

This is a pretty straight-forward launch but happy to answer any questions :)

What would you say is the advantage of Vantage over AWS's Billing Dashboard?[1] I can configure it to send me daily reports and notifications if the costs exceed my daily threshold already. Why do I need Vantage?

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[1] https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing

If I may add on, what does Vantage give me above and beyond AWS Billing Dashboard and AWS Cost Explorer?

Good question. There are a number of things already at the moment and the list keeps growing:

- Vantage gives you per-resource costs for every AWS resource broken down by category and subcategory without the need for you to tag anything. This feature is named Advanced Analytics and allows you to see costs for all AWS resources like Lambda Functions, SQS Queues, SNS Topics, S3 Buckets, etc. You can see more here: https://www.vantage.sh/features/advanced-analytics

- Vantage has Kubernetes service level cost support. We can show you the cost of each individual K8S service by looking at lifecycle events and cross-referencing with underlying EC2 costs. You can see more here: https://www.vantage.sh/features/kubernetes

- Cost Recommendations: Vantage will give you not only ways to optimize your costs within the confines of your AWS account but also make third party recommendations in the best interest of your business....AWS will never do this. Here's an example of our Cloudflare cost recommendation: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-specific-cost-recomme...

- Ease of use. We've heard consistent customer feedback that most people don't enjoy using AWS billing related tools, APIs or even raw data from Cost and Usage Reports as its hard to use and unintuitive. We have focused really hard on developer experience and ease of use.

Vantage has also only been generally available since January of this year...we have a lot more planned for the future and this list will grow.

That second point is huge! What support do you have for pass thru cost attribution in the pipeline past k8s?

Did you use NGrok or some kind of live test environment to develop the slack app or use their new websockets functionality? Also where are you hosting your Slack app?

Congratulations on the launch!

I'm not using Slack anymore but I presume this is very useful to those who do.

But since you're addressing problems with AWS billing, You might be interested in the need-gap in estimating the AWS bill after free 12 months[1] posted on my problem validation platform.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/277-what-will-be-my-aws-bill-af...

This (free, unlimited) tool has been working well for us - https://github.com/iandees/aws-billing-to-slack.

edit - appreciate that Vantage may have better features, but this gives us a reliable daily cost report on Slack.

Just for onlookers who may be curious about the differences here:

The Vantage Slack integration is tied to a primitive called a Cost Report at the end of the day. What this means is if you'd like to configure a Cost Report that filters costs down just for specific AWS member accounts, tags, regions or AWS services (or a combination of the aforementioned) you can do that and then have that be posted to Slack accordingly. Seemingly this tool mentioned above does not allow this to happen and just shows things in aggregate.

How we see this used in practice is that customers will create Cost Reports for certain teams in their organization then post to that team's specific Slack channels accordingly. So essentially creating cost accountability per team via Slack.

Here is a blog post that describes "Filter Sets" and how to apply them to a Cost Report in more depth if you're curious: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-filter-sets

If anyone from Vantage is listening, discord integration would be awesome!

Hey there! Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage here.

We're listening. Happy to get this added as an option :)

This is great, now I can know how much money I'm losing all the time!

This has a high chance of being sherlocked.

nah, nobody at aws is building slack integrations lol. billing ux has been notoriously poor for a long time, theres no investment

Maybe not but Amazon has a massive partnership with Salesforce, and as Salesforce builds out the integrations with Slack I imagine we will be seeing a lot more of these kinds of things(not just in billing, but across the board).

This is just an ad posted by the CEO of this company

Entrepreneurs using HN to drive traffic and discussion of their own sites? What has the world come to!

What's wrong with getting feedback for your product?

A very large part of HN is targeted content marketing

Have you considered a Mattermost integration?

why I would give access to this tool?

ok but I'm on azure. :-(

":-(" indeed.

PRICING LINK: https://www.vantage.sh/pricing

Link in header does not work for me, but I might be special. Link in footer works.

Original (misleading) comment follows:

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Vantage brings you visibility into AWS pricing? Interesting!

But Vantage hides Vantage pricing behind a login? Erm.

(I'm willing to accept the possibility that I just haven't granted the page adequate permissions, but four external sites should be enough for anyone.)

Vantage pricing is publicly available here: https://www.vantage.sh/pricing

Is that what you're looking for?

Yep, that's great.

The "Pricing" link in the header takes me to a login page. Maybe it's just me.

What browser are you using? Both Chrome and Safari seem fine to me on desktop and mobile for pricing links in the header and footer.

Firefox here. With some content blocking, but progressively disabled before I posted my initial comment.

If I make my viewport wider, the "Pricing" and "Login" links are further apart, and hovering "Pricing" no longer highlights "Login" (but clicking the non-highlighted "Pricing" does nothing).

Might be a float or z-axis issue compounded by viewport width and content blocking side effects?

Just to add a data point, I also run fire fox with heavy blocking and it seems to work for me. Maybe it got fixed already.

Pricing link is at the bottom of the page. Not as clear as in the header, but still a fairly common place to see it.

Title doesn’t match.

It should be: “ Vantage Launches Slack Support For Cost Report Notifications”

Totally different thing. Figured that out after wasting a few minutes on this.

Your docs use the term "master" in regards to AWS accounts in some places [0]. FWIW many companies, AWS included, prefer alternate words for various reasons [1]. You may want to match the language for clarity.

[0] https://docs.vantage.sh/connecting/

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...

Thanks for this call-out. I'll personally get this updated this evening.

That was a pretty fast cave to Western political correctness manure. Missed opportunity for a CEO to show some backbone.

That's not constructive. Please refrain from attacks like this on HN. AWS Organizations is changing the name of the “master account” to “management account”. It makes sense for OP to update their docs accordingly, to remain consistent with AWS's naming system.

Objectively speaking, it may not seem constructive if you disagree with the statement. I have no skin in this game, and the change doesn't bother me. I do however, understand the sentiment from a non-western cultural and societal perspective, as I work with a veritable United Nations on a daily basis. Until AWS completely scrubs the language in question from their ecosystem, for example [1], I can see how that call out is misconstrued as being in the spirit of "political correctness" from another's perspective.

I believe you missed an opportunity to engage in good faith conversation with information that could have turned their perspective towards something more positive in nature. As such, I view your reply as not constructive.

[1] https://awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/ref...

The top level post asks to change it for political reasons not to match new aws changes which would make sense. Trying to shutdown discussion by saying this wasn't constructive is not something HN supports and I would ask you to refrain from doing that. The fact that previously neutral words are now negative words is fair game. Perhaps they were never neutral words. Let's discuss, not dismiss.

> The top level post asks to change it for political reasons not to match new aws changes which would make sense.

Not quite. I didn’t actually ask for the wording to be changed. At the very least (and primarily), it’s a term AWS is retiring, and a company like Vantage whose service is entirely based off AWS (for now) is wise to keep parity. That I alluded to companies having reasons for updating certain words is relevant and useful. And I leave it unsaid as to what the reasons are and whether they’re justified because that’s up to the Vantage CEO if there’s further merit beyond syncing docs to make the change.

So calling out a non-substantial change designed to satisfy the bottom-feeders of the industry is “attacking”? Nice try guy.

Putting the political implications aside for just a second,

Why would a company whose product is directly built on top of AWS have their documentation not use the same terminology?

Agreed. Who, exactly, are we serving with this change? The folks with an insatiable appetite for white knighting?

Best way to handle situations like this is to not reply. You're not going to appease the far-left social activists and the right wing culture warriors in any situation. You can't lose if you don't play. Just update docs silently to be consistent with Amazon and stay mission-focused.

Agreed.

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