KnobsLeversButtons

I just got the latest Billing Statement of my Amazon Webservices Account (AWS) for the storage service S3.

Unlike the previous statements which were like $1.50 this one was $7.87 (with taxes). A 5 fold increase! So naturally I looked at a more detailed Billing statement. It seems that I downloaded 24Gb from S3.

I eventually found out what caused this, so no foul play or something. I toyed a bit with the handy S3Browse, when I ran a couple of times in the maximum AWS transfer size (5 GB). I was trying to download photos stored with the excellent JungleDisk.

The billing statement does not give any real insight into where your data is going to, but fortunately you can download a usage report.

AWS usage report

The AWS usage report can be a xml file containing a bunch of OperationUsage tags.

I have a hard time understanding what it means. If anybody can give me some documentation about that I would be grateful. I can not find it here Webservices Developer Connection. The format is:

    1    <OperationUsage>
    2         <ServiceName></ServiceName>
    3         <OperationName></OperationName>
    4         <UsageType></UsageType>
    5         <Resource></Resource>
    6         <StartTime></StartTime>
    7         <EndTime></EndTime>
    8         <UsageValue></UsageValue>
    9     </OperationUsage>

ServiceName

In my case this is always AmazonS3. So this seems the Amazon service. if you use Electric Compute Cloud it will be AmazonEC2??

OperationName

Does not seem to important. My log contains:

• ListBucket
• StandardStorage
• ListAllMyBuckets
• HeadObject
• PutObject
• GetObject
• UnknownAction

With the exception of HeadObject, UnknownAction I have some idea of what this means.

Usage type

The best I could find was Usage tracking
However that document states that the following usage types are possible:

• TimedStorage-ByteHrs
• AverageStorage-Bytes
• Network-Bytes
• Request

However my report contains also DataTransfer-In-Bytes or DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is this the Network-Bytes renamed??? Request is now a Requests-Tier1 or Requests-Tier2. No idea what this means.

Resource

The once listed in my case are the buckets. Is this always the case?

Usage Value

What’s this? I assumed it was the number of bytes. However:

    1    <OperationUsage>
    2         <ServiceName>AmazonS3</ServiceName>
    3         <OperationName>StandardStorage</OperationName>
    4         <UsageType>TimedStorage-ByteHrs</UsageType>
    5         <Resource>476de2a71aa5a476f84d48e4d61c980-default</Resource>
    6         <StartTime>07/04/07 00:00:00</StartTime>
    7         <EndTime>07/05/07 00:00:00</EndTime>
    8         <UsageValue>228990865824</UsageValue>
    9     </OperationUsage>

Noticing line 8 it states 228990865824 bytes(?). How this relates to the about 9.1 GB in that bucket is beyond me.

Final remarks

I understand that S3 is for developers and not for end users like me. However if you are giving reports, some documentation would have been nice. It seems that developer information is missing as well. Perhaps my search capabilities (I looked in the AWS forums) was lacking. If there is some information about the OperationUsage I would like to know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Amazon, JungleDisk, S3, S3Browse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.