Connecting AWS Consolidated Billing Accounts to RightScale

Overview

This support page will walk you through setting up RightScale to work with your AWS Consolidated Billing accounts. Once set up, RightScale usage and cost reporting will be more accurate and reflect the benefits of Consolidated Billing, such as sharing Reserved Instances across accounts. This will enable you to optimize your costs across all your Consolidated Billing accounts and make better purchase option decisions.

Please note that in order to get the benefits of usage and cost reporting, you will need to connect all your AWS accounts to RightScale and have at least 'observer' permissions to each RightScale account. However if you'd like to get an overview of your costs per AWS account in the Cloud Analytics dashboard, all you need to connect to is the AWS Payer account.

Prerequisites

In order to set up your AWS Consolidated Billing with RightScale, you need to have permissions to create RightScale accounts and connect to clouds. Therefore, the 'enterprise_manager' and 'admin' permissions are required. Please see the User Roles page for additional information.

You also need to be on a RightScale account which has access to the Consolidated Billing page. To check if you have access to this page, log into RightScale Cloud Management and navigate to Settings > Consolidated Billing.

If you do not have the required roles, or cannot see the Consolidated Billing page, please reach out to your RightScale account administrator, or email support@rightscale.com.

Steps

In order for RightScale to recognize your Consolidated Billing account structure, AWS CloudWatch needs to be enabled to Receive Billing Alerts on your AWS Payer Account.

1. Log into your AWS Payer Account.
2. Navigate to the Billing & Cost Management menu option.

3. Go into the Preferences menu option, select 'Receive Billing Alerts' and click Save preferences.

Now that CloudWatch Billing Alerts have been set up, you need to connect AWS to RightScale.

1. Log into the RightScale Cloud Management dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Consolidated Billing. If you do not see this menu option, please note the prerequisites above.
3. If you have connected all your AWS accounts to RightScale, this page will validate this by showing you all the AWS accounts under your Consolidated Billing group, and the links between these and the RightScale accounts they have been connected to.
4. If you have not connected all your AWS accounts to RightScale, this page will give you the option to quickly create RightScale accounts and connect them to your AWS account.

5. For each AWS account which has not been connected to RightScale, click the Create New Account link. This will open a dialog enabling you to enter a RightScale account name, and the AWS IAM credentials to establish the connection. If you need help in setting up AWS IAM, please read the step-by-step guide for setting up IAM with RightScale.

6. Once you have connected all your AWS accounts to RightScale, it will take up to 24 hours for your cost reports to reflect the change.