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Connect an AWS account - get granular insights on costs
Connect an AWS account - get granular insights on costs

Add insights on costs & granular costs per resource to your AWS resources on Tailwarden

Cyril avatar
Written by Cyril
Updated over 2 months ago

Please be advised that you first need to connect your AWS account. Please refer to this page to learn how to do this.

In this guide, you'll learn how to enable the AWS granular costs feature to get the cost at the resource level. The IAM policy for giving Tailwarden access to your Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) S3 bucket can be found here.

In case you have connected an AWS organization account, you only need to setup the cost insights for the main account.

Please note that AWS only starts providing data from the day you set up the Cost and Usage Report (CUR). Consequently, Tailwarden will not display historical data points prior to this setup.

However, you can request AWS to backfill data for the CUR, which will allow Tailwarden to access and display historical cost data points. You can find additional information here. We can also help you draft your email to AWS support.


Part 1: enable CUR on your AWS account

  1. Go to Billing and click on "Cost and Usage Reports"


  2. Click on "Create Report" - pick the name you want for the S3 and tick "Include Resources Id". Then click on "Next."

    If you're using EKS, do not forget to tick "Split cost allocation data".

  3. Click on "Configure" and add information as in the screenshot below. You can pick the name you want for the bucket & the region you want. Click on "Save"


  4. Pick the name you want for the S3 path prefix. Keep "Hourly", "Create new report version", and "GZIP". Regarding Redshift and QuickSight, tick if you use those services. You cannot add Athena today as it's not possible to have a csv. CUR with Athena enabled. Click on "Next"


  5. Click on "Create Report"

Part 2: Give access to the report to your Tailwarden account

  1. Open the report you have just created


  2. In another tab, open "Roles" in IAM


  3. Look for "Tailwarden" in the search bar and open the Role. Usually, the name is "TailwardenDataCollection-xxxxxxx"


  4. Click on "Add permissions" > "Create inline policy."


  5. Click "JSON" and copy/paste the permissions here in the "Policy Editor". Please change
    - BUCKET_NAME with the value you have in step 1 under "Bucket name"
    - PREFIX with the value you have in step 1 under "S3 path prefix"
    Then continue by clicking on "Next"
    For our example, the permissions become:


  6. Give a name to your policy. For instance, it can be "s3CURTailwarden". Then click on "Create policy". You're almost here :)

  7. Open your cloud account on Tailwarden & go to the tab "Granular costs"


  8. Go Click on "Enable granular costs" and fill in the information "S3 bucket", "S3 path prefix" and the region of S3 as written in the CUR report. Click on "Save changes". Please be advised you need to add an "/" at the end of the "Report path prefix"



Voilà. The first time a CUR is set up, AWS needs 24h to generate a report. As soon as it's done, we'll send you an email.


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