Cost Explorer | John Nessime

The Real Cost of CloudWatch: Logs, Metrics, Retention and Cardinality

Post category:Cloud Computing FinOps Monitoring

CloudWatch rarely fails loudly, it accumulates. This is a breakdown of the four independent meters behind the bill: ingestion, storage, Logs Insights scans and custom metric cardinality. Why the same log line gets billed three times, why log groups never expire by default, how a single dimension can multiply your metrics bill without your traffic changing, and how to attribute the spend to specific log groups before you start deleting things.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags: Getting Real Coverage on a Messy Bill

Post category:Cloud Computing FinOps Technical Guides

Tagging a resource and activating a cost allocation tag are two different operations, and AWS never tells you when you have only done the first. A practical guide to the activation gap, what backfill can and cannot repair, the five places coverage leaks, and a retrofit order that actually converges.

Cut AWS Costs Without Breaking Production: A Blast-Radius Playbook

Post category:Cloud Computing DevOps Technical Guides

Most AWS cost work goes wrong because it starts with the biggest line item, which is also the riskiest. Order the work by blast radius instead: free networking and storage fixes first, performance envelopes one workload at a time, and commitments last. Includes the commands to find the waste and the cuts that look harmless and are not.

The AWS Account Health Check I Run Before Quoting a Project

Post category:Cloud Computing Cloud Security FinOps

Before I quote AWS work, I run a read-only account health check: six passes covering identity, logging, region sprawl, infrastructure code, cost shape and support escalation. Here are the commands, the pass tests, and the findings that change the number.