February 2023 Summaries

Vantage has introduced support for New Relic costs within its platform, allowing users to view these expenses alongside those from major infrastructure providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This integration enables customers to automatically ingest and visualize New Relic costs by connecting their accounts through Vantage, which then refreshes the data daily for up-to-date reporting. The integration allows costs to be broken down by service and category, and users can manage multiple New Relic accounts without additional charges, although these costs may count toward their quota tier limits. This new feature aims to help organizations better manage and understand their observability costs, which are often second only to primary infrastructure expenditures, by providing a consolidated view of expenses that simplifies the process of tracking and analyzing cloud costs.

Vantage has introduced enhancements to its Cost Report filtering capabilities, allowing users to filter by specific resource identifiers and names across multiple providers, including AWS, Azure, Fastly, and MongoDB. This update enables users to create more precise cost reports by using resource identifiers such as ARNs, resource IDs, CDNs, and cluster names, along with wildcard matching for partial names. Previously, Vantage allowed filtering by account, service, and tag, but the new feature addresses limitations where tagging was insufficient or unsupported by providers. The addition of resource-level filtering, with operators like "starts with" and "ends with," facilitates creating reports for specific environments or functions, aiding FinOps teams in allocating and reporting costs accurately without needing cost allocation tags. This enhancement, which supports showback and chargeback use cases, is available to all customers without additional cost, offering a refined tool for tracking cloud expenses.

In a comparison of database technologies for analyzing over a billion rows of AWS cost data for the Q4 2022 Cloud Costs Report, DuckDB significantly outperformed PostgreSQL, demonstrating query speeds between 4 to 200 times faster. The transition from Postgres to DuckDB was driven by DuckDB's column-store architecture, which enabled rapid data processing, efficient storage, and real-time data exploration, especially for complex queries and derivative table creation. While DuckDB excelled in query performance, data ingestion, and compression, reducing disk usage from 21GB to 1.7GB, it also presented challenges such as limited built-in functions compared to Postgres. Despite these drawbacks, DuckDB's ability to process large datasets swiftly allowed for a more efficient and productive analysis, contributing to the timely publication of the Q4 report. The experience suggests that while Postgres may not have been the best fit for this task, DuckDB's performance and capabilities have made it a preferred choice for future data analysis needs.

Vantage has launched support for tracking MongoDB Atlas costs within its platform, allowing customers to view these expenses alongside those from primary cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure. By integrating MongoDB Atlas organizations via API keys, users can access detailed cost breakdowns by organization, project, and cluster, offering a comprehensive view of their application deployment expenses. This integration supports a variety of filters and dimensions for cost reports, such as service, cost category, and project, and updates daily to ensure up-to-date data visualization. This feature is available to all Vantage users, including those on the free tier, and facilitates a seamless experience for those using MongoDB Atlas as a primary datastore, enhancing transparency in cloud spend management.