> The third party cost tracking tools (CloudHealth/Metricly/CloudAbility/Cloudyn) are just a wrapper around what you can get out of the CUR. Their value-add is

> The third party cost tracking tools (CloudHealth/Metricly/CloudAbility/Cloudyn) are just a wrapper around what you can get out of the CUR. Their value-add is reporting and advisement, and giving recommendations on right sizing and reserved instances and savings plans. Though if your cloud team is sufficiently savvy they can do this themselves. I work for one of the vendors you mentioned; and while you're not wrong - the data sources are all from the vendors - there's a fair bit of work that goes into actually making sense of it to the point you can give it to people actually causing the spend. Also there's work that goes into optimisation, so that we can bear the cost of your second point. Your last point is dead on though. For anyone doing cloud at any scale, tagging is non-optional if you want to do any kind of optimisation, chargeback or the like.