Cost Efficiency Widget Adds a Score to Billing Dashboards
AWS Billing and Cost Management gains a new widget to track an 'efficiency score.' But what does that score actually represent?
Editorial summary and commentary based on the original from AWS What's New. Read the original
AWS Billing and Cost Management just added a "cost efficiency score." Now we just need to know what it measures.
What changed
- A new Cost Efficiency widget is available for AWS Billing and Cost Management (BCM) Dashboards.
- The widget displays an "efficiency score" over time, with options to filter by account, region, or overall.
- It links to the Cost Optimization Hub and supports dashboard exports, including scheduled reports and CSV/PDF downloads.
Why it matters
This addition aims to provide a more unified view of cost management by integrating an explicit "efficiency score" into existing BCM dashboards. The honest version: Previously, teams had to correlate data from Cost Explorer, Savings Plans coverage reports, and Cost Optimization Hub recommendations to infer efficiency. This widget attempts to surface a single metric, potentially simplifying the initial assessment of optimization performance. It pairs with Cost Optimization Hub for actionable recommendations, aiming to streamline the path from insight to action.
The catch
The catch: The announcement provides no definition or methodology for the "efficiency score." It's unclear what inputs are used, how the score is calculated (e.g., is it based on Savings Plans utilization, Reserved Instance coverage, idle resource identification, or a combination?), or what constitutes a