So you're trusting the 'Usage Reports' section to forecast costs. What if it's wrong?
I spent half a day reverse-engineering the CSV exports because the portal's summary dashboard was off by ~12% against our actual invoice. Found the usual suspects: pro-rated partial days counted as full, aggregated stats that don't match the raw line items, and no clear tag for which usage falls under which committed-use discount tier.
The process, if you want to verify:
1. Pull raw usage data for the period, not the summary.
2. Cross-reference each service ID with your committed discount schedule (good luck finding that in the portal).
3. Manually adjust for the pro-rated entries the report doesn't flag.
4. Compare your calculated total to the invoice. Prepare for a follow-up call with support.
Open question: has anyone built a script to normalize this, or are we all just accepting the margin of error as an operational cost?
Doubt everything