The release of Aimably v2.5.0 went live today, 09/08/2021. This release is what we deem perfective maintenance and represents our ongoing standard to fix issues or make smaller adjustments to the application to improve the user experience. As with any issue in software we have to put on our sleuthing hats and get to investigating!

The Case of the Mysterious Dollar

An issue came to our attention that a cost metric named “Dollar” was displayed in the Detailed Spend view in Aimably Insight. This was typically displayed on the first of each month and had no supporting documentation or information.

Upon investigation it was discovered this was a different type of value being passed to Aimably via the AWS API. The dollar metric is an example of an aggregate metric type for AWS Support costs. It is broken down into subunits such as “AWS Support (Developer) and AWS Support (Business) and displays when your organization has incurred an AWS Support cost.

This has now been corrected and we are displaying the primary descriptor of “Dollar” as well as the subunit type for the associated support cost.

This will now empower you better to not only understand your support costs, but also to interrogate them more deeply with AWS support and get them lower or removed altogether with diligence.

The Case of the Missing Cost Metric

Another issue similar to the dollar support cost metric was that on the 30th or 31st of each month cost metrics across all instances are missing. This was investigated and it was determined that there was an issue in the results being returned from the API and how they are paginated depending on if the month had 30 or 31 days.

This has been corrected and now cost metric data is displayed for all days in each month as expected.

The Case of the Terminated Database

An issue was found where terminated auto-scaling, clustered databases were not being cleaned up properly and were still displaying in Aimably. So as the database cluster auto-scales a new instance would be created with the size increment as it scales up. Once that is complete the original instance is shutdown and terminated.. Aimably was still keeping a record of the terminated databases and sowing them in various application pages. This was a display only issue and did not affect any other functionality in Aimably, such as cost metrics, Pulse emails or Warn notifications. This has been rectified and now database instances of this type will no longer be displayed once their termination is done and they are purged.

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