After over a year of work our team is pleased to announce the release of v2.0, known to us as Aimably Beta. Aimably Beta features introductory versions of three of our flagship modules: Aimably Warn, Aimably Reduce and Aimably Insight. Together, these three modules provide meaningful AWS bill clarity, actionable tools for instant cost lowering activities and confidence that if costs are in danger of overrun, Aimably will let you know.

Below, we will introduce you to each of the products. If you like what you see, sign up as a beta customer today!

Aimably Warn

In the world of usage-driven costs, it is imperative that you know exactly what events are taking place in your system that may be driving up your AWS bill. While Amazon’s proprietary AWS Budgets system can tell you when your estimated monthly bill is over your expectations, Aimably Warn delivers actionable intelligence regarding the nature of the cost overrun and provides you with linked access to the Aimably Insight tool for detailed drill down.

Because Aimably was designed with cross-departmental collaboration in mind, we offer unique user roles in Aimably Warn in our Beta release, allowing teams to customize the type, degree and frequency of alerts based on the business utility of these notifications.

At this time, alerts are delivered via email only. Would you like Aimably Warn to transfer notifications through additional systems? Please submit feedback to our team to help us prioritize.

Aimably Reduce

Here at Aimably, we deeply appreciate each AWS team’s contribution to reducing customer costs and providing tools for analyzing overhead. The trouble is, there is no central tool to take action across a customer’s entire AWS infrastructure. Through our comprehensive approach to AWS cost reduction, Aimably Reduce becomes that central tool. Plus, we make the cost reduction activities clear and straightforward, without requiring you to be an expert in AWS jargon.

In the Aimably Beta Release, Aimably Reduce offers cost control mechanisms through direct actions to stop and start servers instantly or place them on pre-configured schedules. Why? Only the servers running a production environment (i.e. the ‘live’ software that your customers interact with) need to be active and available 24/7. The rest need to be available only when your team needs them, for development projects or for quality testing, for instance.

Imagine your company (let’s call it ACME Corporation) is like many companies and includes a testing environment, a pre-production staging environment and a number of developer environments alongside your production environment. ACME could easily be spending 50% of your AWS bill on non-production servers. Via Aimably Reduce, your team can configure ACME non-production environments to automatically go offline at the end of the work day and come back online at the beginning of the next work day. By limiting non-production server activity to a possible 40 hour work week, your servers could be quiet for the other 128 hours in the week, offering your company an instant 38% reduction of ACME’s total AWS bill. Plus, if a team member needs access after hours, they can simply flip the switch in Aimably and get to work.

While much of this functionality mimics the AWS Instance Scheduler, Aimably Reduce allows you to grant server scheduling and stop/start rights to users without giving away full AWS Console access. Additionally, as Aimably Reduce adds additional cost reduction tools, we will offer each in a central, easy-to-use area of our product.

At this time, our AWS cost control tools are limited to server stop/start actions, however there are many additional tools on our roadmap including Savings Plans analysis and selection, Kubernetes scaling configuration and optimization, S3 tiering implementation and many, many more. Are there any particular savings projects or tools that you would like to see managed by Aimably Reduce? Please submit your feedback to our team to help us prioritize.

Aimably Insight

You’ve gotten your AWS bill and it’s absurdly high. You’re not sure what went wrong. Well, once you’ve connected up Aimably, implemented some Aimably Reduce interventions and gotten Aimably Warn configured to make sure this doesn’t happen again, we recommend you move over to Aimably Insight to take a deeper look. The dashboard and the drill down reports provided in Aimably Insight grant clearer visualizations that are far easier to understand than AWS Cost Explorer.

With Aimably Insight, we currently offer the following visualizations and drill-down reports:

Region Explorer

Analyze where in the world each of your services and servers are being operated.

Daily Total Cost Trend

Plot and review singular day over day costs, allowing you to find the day when problems occurred. Use this view to drill into a detailed Cost Increase Review organized by day.

Monthly Total Cost Trend

Plot and review singular month over month costs, allowing you to determine the rate of monthly increase and review against expectations. Use this view to drill into a detailed Cost Increase Review organized by month.

Month to Date Trend Comparison

Plot and review your accrued monthly cost by day of the month, allowing you to validate whether you’re on track for a similar, increased or reduced bill.

Inventory Summary

Get a snapshot of your current servers and services organized by type with ability to drill down into each to review individual assets.

Inventory Trend

By each type of server or service, review over-time utilization of inventory to be able to pinpoint sources of growth, such as increasing reliance on storage.

Cost Increase Review

Review each individual asset found on an AWS bill by current spend and increase over time.

Is there a dashboard or drill-down report that you would find helpful in your AWS cost analysis? Let us know, by sending our team your feedback!

Thank you for joining us on the journey that is our new product. Apply to join our Beta Program today!

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