Amazon S3 Storage Lens is a cloud-storage analytics feature that provides organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity. This tool is designed to help users understand their storage patterns, detect outliers, and make informed decisions about their storage management.
Veeam Data Platform is using Amazon S3 as a repository in different products, on-prem, Hybrid, Cloud-Native and more.
Why Enable AWS S3 Storage Lens
- Comprehensive Visibility: S3 Storage Lens delivers a single view of object storage usage and activity across multiple accounts, regions, and buckets. This helps in understanding storage trends and identifying inefficiencies.
- Actionable Insights: It provides more than 60 metrics (including both free and advanced metrics) that can be visualized in an interactive dashboard. These metrics help in identifying cost-saving opportunities, enhancing data protection, and improving performance.
- Cost Optimization: By analyzing storage usage and activity patterns, S3 Storage Lens can pinpoint areas where costs can be reduced, such as through better storage class usage or lifecycle policies.
- Ease of Use: S3 Storage Lens is simple to set up and configure, making it accessible even for users who are not deeply technical. The insights provided can lead to significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Cost of AWS S3 Storage Lens
The pricing for S3 Storage Lens is tiered and varies based on the number of objects monitored:
- Free Metrics: All customers have access to 28 free metrics with 14 days of historical data at no charge.
- Advanced Metrics: For more detailed insights, customers can upgrade to advanced metrics, which include 35 additional metrics, prefix-level insights, and extended data retention. The cost for advanced metrics is $0.20 per million objects monitored per month for the first 25 billion objects, $0.16 per million for the next 75 billion objects, and $0.12 per million for any objects beyond 100 billion.
These costs are designed to be scalable and cost-effective, especially for organizations with large storage footprints, potentially saving up to 40% on monitoring costs for those with hundreds of billions of objects.
S3 Storage Lens and Immutability
Using S3 Storage lens is particularly helpful when Immutability is enabled as it gives a detailed information on the associated costs related to S3 Object Lock and can help avoid bill shock and eliminate some gotchas with the visibility and ability to change the Block Generation period.
For example, in the below chart, we realized that a customer is using weekly backup that are immutable for 14 days, so before the default immutability period was changed from 10 to 30 days, they saw a spike in the object lock extend API costs related to this bucket.
By changing the block generation period to 30 days, we were able to drastically reduce the API charges.
Enabling AWS S3 Storage Lens is a strategic decision for organizations using S3 for backups. It provides the visibility and insights needed to make informed decisions about storage management, ultimately leading to improved cost efficiency and operational performance.