Beyond Cost Explorer: 10 Vantage Workflows for Costs

Vantage offers a more advanced solution for managing AWS cloud costs compared to Amazon's Cost Explorer, addressing several limitations that users face as their cloud spend and account complexity grow. Unlike Cost Explorer, which provides basic functionality and is limited to single-dimension groupings and broad cost categories, Vantage allows multi-dimensional grouping, detailed resource-level anomaly detection, and more granular access controls, making it suitable for enterprise-grade reporting. It also offers capabilities such as drilling down into specific costs like NAT Gateways, managing reserved instances across all services, and selecting views for amortization, credits, discounts, and taxes. Furthermore, Vantage clarifies complex cost categories such as "EC2-Other" by breaking them down into distinct line items, which simplifies the evaluation of costs associated with various AWS services. These enhancements make Vantage a robust tool for organizations looking to mature their FinOps functions and achieve comprehensive cloud cost management.