Styx gets single-pane Amazon QuickSight FinOps over the AWS Cost & Usage Report
Amazon QuickSight
AWS CUR
Amazon Athena
AWS GlueShared anonymously — the customer’s name is held by VeUP and available on request.
A Canadian digital-risk-protection ISV was flying its AWS costs on spreadsheets and Cost Explorer roll-ups. VeUP built it a single pane of glass: a production Amazon QuickSight FinOps dashboard over the AWS Cost & Usage Report, showing every developer what Lambda, RDS, and intra-region traffic actually cost — at the resource level.
The challenge
The company is cost-conscious and R&D-heavy, and its platform was scaling faster than its cost visibility. Cost Explorer could show the roll-ups; it couldn’t break out what a single Lambda function, RDS instance, or intra-region data path was costing. The team needed that resolution — plus billing alerts, commitment guidance for a variable workload, and an AWS Marketplace listing to reach enterprise co-sell — without standing up a BI team to get it.
The solution
VeUP ran the engagement as managed FinOps and built the reporting core to last: the AWS Cost & Usage Report lands in an S3 data lake, AWS Glue catalogs it, Amazon Athena queries it, and Amazon QuickSight turns it into a single-pane dashboard with parameters, controls, and row-level security — so developers see their own resource-level costs without a BI team in the loop.
Around the dashboard: AWS Budgets and billing alerts, Reserved-Instance guidance tuned to a variable workload, IAM Identity Center and KMS for access and encryption, a Well-Architected Review — and an AWS Marketplace product listing and bundle that opened the door to enterprise co-sell.
Production outcomes
| KPI | Result |
|---|---|
| Production outcomes | The QuickSight dashboard runs in production for the company’s developers — resource-level cost visibility across Lambda, RDS, and intra-region traffic that Cost Explorer can’t provide, replacing manual spreadsheet review. Billing alerts and RI guidance are live, the Well-Architected Review is done, and the AWS Marketplace listing and bundle are open for enterprise co-sell. |
| Timeline | On AWS with VeUP since mid-2023. The Marketplace bundle and Well-Architected Review landed over 2024, with the Marketplace listing live that autumn — and the FinOps engagement continues. |
| Cost posture | The QuickSight-over-CUR surface is itself the FinOps mechanism: resource-level cost attribution plus billing alerts and RI guidance for a variable workload. Realized savings stay in the customer’s own AWS accounts. |
| Lessons & continuation | QuickSight-over-CUR (S3 + Glue + Athena) gives a small, cost-conscious ISV resource-level cost visibility that Cost Explorer can't, and a developer-facing single pane drives FinOps adoption better than spreadsheets; pairing the build with a Marketplace listing opens enterprise co-sell. |
Architecture
Where it started
Assessed baseline · new FinOps/BI layerComputer & Network Security — digital-risk-protection ISV · CanadaAWS Lambda and Amazon RDS running the digital-risk-protection workload, SOC 2 in progress, with a variable, R&D-heavy usage pattern.
AWS Cost Explorer roll-ups only — no per-resource or intra-region breakdown for the Lambda and RDS workloads.
A periodic, off-workflow exercise — not read by the engineering team day to day.
No proactive billing alerts and no Reserved-Instance or commitment guidance on a steady baseline.
The engagement added a FinOps/BI layer alongside the existing workload — the production platform itself was not migrated or re-architected.
Amazon S3
AWS Budgets
AWS IAM Identity Center
AWS KMS