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Cost Insights Guide

On the Dashboard, CloudWise ranks your waste findings by monthly saving ("Top waste findings"), shows your spend and its trend, and breaks cost down by service, region, account or tag ("Cost breakdown"). This guide shows you what matters most and how to take action on the insights.

What Are Cost Insights?​

Cost Insights are data-driven recommendations that help you:

  • Save money - Surface optimization opportunities sized from your own data
  • Prevent cost surprises - Get alerts before spending gets out of control
  • Make smart decisions - Understand which services are driving your costs

All figures in this guide are illustrative placeholders. Your actual numbers come from your own AWS data. CloudWise sizes each waste finding from your resources and published AWS pricing, then caps it at what your Cost and Usage Report shows you were billed where it can check (see How savings are calculated). It does not promise a fixed savings percentage. Where scan findings are not available, a few Dashboard and report figures fall back to rough percentage-of-spend estimates, which are not findings.

Key Insight Types You'll See​

💰 Optimization Opportunities​

What it shows: Specific dollar amounts you can save, calculated from your usage Example (illustrative): "Potential savings of $XX identified across your services"

Why it matters: These are money-saving opportunities sized from your data. Each finding shows:

  • The resource and its account
  • How confident the detection is
  • The risk of fixing it
  • The estimated monthly saving, labelled as checked against your AWS bill or estimated at list price

Take action by: Following the specific recommendations like rightsizing resources or changing usage patterns.

⚠️ Cost Concentration​

What it shows: How much of your spending is concentrated in one service Where to see it: Open Dashboard → Cost breakdown → Service and read the Share column; the top service's share of spend is shown there. The Dashboard does not raise a concentration alert.

Why it matters: Concentration creates risk - if that one service has issues or price changes, it dramatically impacts your bill.

Take action by: Diversifying services or optimizing the concentrated service first.

📈 Spending Trend​

What it shows: How your costs are changing over time Where to see it: The Dashboard hero shows your spend for the selected period with the percentage change against the prior period of the same length. The Cost breakdown table has a Trend column per service, region, account or tag.

Why it matters: Shows whether spend is rising or falling against the prior period, and which services, regions or accounts are driving it. The Cost anomalies card (on the Shield and Agentic plans) flags service-level spikes.

Understanding Your Workspace​

Total Potential Savings​

This number shows how much you could save, summed from the current findings (your real total, calculated from your data).

Service Breakdown Priority​

Focus on your highest-cost services first. The breakdown ranks every service by its share of spend, for instance a database or compute service at the top (example only). Fixed-cost lines such as domain registration and Cost Explorer are listed but are not treated as optimization opportunities.

Cost Efficiency​

The Dashboard shows "Cost efficiency" as a percentage: 100% minus your open savings opportunity as a share of your spend. A higher percentage means less identified waste relative to spend. There are no fixed rating bands.

Taking Action on Insights​

Start with High-Impact Items​

Start with findings that have:

  • High confidence and Low risk = Safest to act on
  • A large Saving / mo = Best ROI for your time (the table sorts by saving by default)

Common Quick Wins​

For Authentication Services (Cognito)​

  • Review user pool configurations
  • Optimize authentication flows
  • Consider user lifecycle management

For Cost Explorer​

  • Reduce API call frequency
  • Optimize query patterns
  • Use caching where possible

For Domain Services (Route 53/Registrar)​

  • Consolidate unused domains
  • Review DNS query patterns
  • Optimize routing policies

Implementation Strategy​

  1. Week 1: Implement highest-confidence, lowest-risk optimizations
  2. Week 2-4: Tackle medium-complexity optimizations
  3. Month 2+: Plan architectural changes for long-term savings

Measuring Success​

Track Your Progress​

  • Before: Note your Cost efficiency percentage and your Savings opportunity when you start
  • After: Check them again after fixing findings
  • Ongoing: Watch for new insights as your infrastructure evolves

What to Track​

As you act on insights, watch for:

  • Improved cost predictability through better monitoring
  • Faster problem detection with automated alerts
  • A rising Cost efficiency percentage as you clear high-confidence findings

CloudWise reports the savings specific to your environment—it doesn't promise a fixed percentage.

Illustrative Example​

The numbers below are placeholders to show the shape of an analysis, not a savings claim.

Scenario: A 30-day analysis surfaces concentration and savings findings

Key Insights (illustrative):

  • A single service (e.g., Amazon Cognito) accounts for a large share of spend
  • Per-finding potential savings, each calculated from real usage
  • A Cost efficiency percentage reflecting current state

Action Plan:

  1. Immediate (Week 1): Act on the highest-confidence, lowest-risk findings
  2. Short-term (Month 1): Reduce API call frequency on heavy services
  3. Medium-term (Month 2): Review architecture for longer-term savings

Getting the Most Value​

Daily Habits​

  • Check the Dashboard for new findings and cost anomalies (2 minutes)
  • Review any budget alert emails or Slack messages

Weekly Reviews​

  • Analyze service breakdown changes
  • Track optimization implementation progress
  • Identify emerging cost patterns

Monthly Planning​

  • Review Cost efficiency improvements
  • Plan next round of cost optimizations
  • Assess budget vs. actual spending trends

Advanced Features​

Custom Alerts​

Set up notifications for:

  • Spending thresholds: "Alert when monthly costs exceed $400"
  • Service spend: set a budget alert filtered to the service with a dollar threshold
  • Cost spikes: anomaly detection (Shield and Agentic plans) runs automatically on each service's daily cost and alerts on spikes well above its recent normal (see Anomaly Detection for the fixed rule). You cannot set your own percentage

Multi-Account Insights​

For organizations with multiple AWS accounts:

  • Cross-account cost comparison
  • Consolidated optimization opportunities
  • Account-specific trend analysis

Integration Capabilities​

  • Slack notifications for critical cost alerts
  • Email reports for weekly optimization summaries
  • Prometheus metrics endpoint for your own dashboards (Shield and above, see Prometheus Integration)

Troubleshooting Common Issues​

"No insights showing"​

  • Cause: Insufficient data (need 7+ days of cost data)
  • Solution: Wait for more billing data to accumulate

"Low confidence recommendations"​

  • Cause: Low confidence marks housekeeping-type findings or checks that rely on weaker evidence; it does not improve with time
  • Solution: Review each one before acting. High confidence findings are binary facts such as an unattached volume

"Savings estimates seem high"​

  • Cause: Where your Cost and Usage Report has no per-resource detail, a savings figure stays a list-price estimate, and it is labelled as one. It can be higher than your bill if you have Reserved Instance, Savings Plan or negotiated discounts
  • Solution: Turn on resource IDs in your Cost and Usage Report so figures can be checked against what AWS billed, and start with high-confidence items. See How savings are calculated

Support and Next Steps​

Getting Help​

Cost Insights are updated daily with fresh AWS billing data. Review each recommendation against your own environment before acting.