AWS Knowledge
Understanding Amazon S3 Storage Lens & How to Use It

Piyush Kalra
Dec 13, 2024
With the rise of cloud storage, the way businesses operate and handle data storage has completely changed. Many tools are available, but Amazon S3 is one of the top performers when it comes to object storage in cloud environments. However, for many organizations, data management is getting more difficult, especially since it has been increasing by around 40% every year. This is where Amazon S3 Storage Lens comes into play.
Using Amazon S3 Storage Lens, you can gain actionable insights that allow you to monitor, optimize, and protect your storage effectively. However, how exactly does it help your business? This guide aims to uncover everything a cloud developer needs to know to effectively utilize the S3 Storage Lens.
By the end, you’ll also learn why Pump is the best option for efficiently streamlining S3 and cutting your cloud costs.
What is Amazon S3 Storage Lens?
Amazon S3 Storage Lens provides a fully insightful advanced storage analysis feature. It gives you a wide-ranging perspective on the usage of cloud storage resources and activity across the organizational setup, which helps with informed decisions.
Storage Lens has an interactive dashboard provides a single-pane-of-glass view of storage metrics and trends. The dashboard displays various reports, including reports showing resource distribution and wasted resource tracking.
Key Features of S3 Storage Lens
All-Encompassing Metrics: More than just an object count or cost of storage, there are over 60 compliance, performance metrics, and storage activity and usage metrics alongside these two, which are essential to the advanced metrics.
Basic Feature Available for Free: Free users are provided with basic details, while the advanced metrics’ more detailed data points cover prefix-level activity and 15-month trend history.
Customizable Views: Users can slice and dice the data according to their preference by showing it by region, prefix, or bucket.
Actionable Insights: Detections of contextual anomalies paired with suggestions are helpful for expense reduction and add a layer of data protection.
Reports And Exports: Metrics can be exported to third-party tools for deeper analysis in CSV or Parquet format.
Why Use Amazon S3 Storage Lens?
Companies making use of Amazon S3 will find great benefits from the Storage Lens. Let’s take a look at its importance for businesses:
Greater Visibility: The structure provided allows storage usage and activity from various accounts and regions to be viewed without the need to jump between them. This eliminates the chance of missing out on valuable data.
Cost Optimization: Deleted data, abandoned multipart uploads, and data sitting idle in expensive storage tiers are some of the things which can be leveraged in order to save money.
Enhanced Data Security: Due to data protection metrics that monitor, for example, compliance status, the usage of encryption, and replication, companies can confirm that their data protection is up to par within the industry.
Performance Improvement: Determine where operations are slowed down by analyzing metrics such as request latency or request accident metrics, and mitigate them by improving business processes.
How Does Amazon S3 Storage Lens Work?

(Image Source: AWS S3)
Amazon S3 Storage Lens helps you monitoring and optimize your S3 storage by collecting and analyzing data from your AWS accounts, regions, or buckets. Let’s break it down with an example:
1. Data Collection
Imagine you run an e-commerce business and have stored thousands of individual product images in S3, spread out over various buckets. You have your images stored in multiple storage classes like Standard and Intelligent-Tiering. Amazon S3 Storage Lens automatically gathers metrics, including:
How much data is stored in each class (e.g., 70% in Standard, 30% in Intelligent Tiering).
The size and number of objects in each bucket.
How fast the storage is growing.
Access permissions for each bucket (to ensure security).
2. Metrics Processing
After the metrics have been collected and stored, Amazon web services processes this data in order to gain insight. In some of its other services, it might indicate that a single bucket is expanding at a rate that is 30% more than that of the remaining data or that 40% of data you have in standard storage has not been accessed for over a year, indicating that this data could be saved by moving it over to Glacier.
3. Interactive Visualization
In the Amazon S3 console, you can view all this information in a clear through an interactive dashboard. Let's say you want to use a filter that narrows down to a specific territory like North America or a particular department such as marketing assets. The dashboard might show inefficient storage of marketing assets, with a bulk of images saved in expensive storage classes.
4. Exportable Reports
Let's say you would like further details from Exploring the Data. You can now export the daily metrics to an S3 inventory in CSV or Parquet format. For example, the storage data analysis of marketing assets can be exported and transferred to a BI tool such as Tableau. This enables your team to perform an in-depth cost analysis for the specific domain and generate reports for their respective stakeholders.
Setting Up Amazon S3 Storage Lens
Starting with Amazon S3 Storage Lens is easy and fast; follow this simple guide.
Step 1: Make the Storage Lens Enabled
Log in to the AWS Management Console and access the Amazon S3 console.

Navigate to Storage Lens under "Dashboards."

Click Create Dashboard.

Step 2: Set the Scope
Determine whether your dashboard will cover spending on storage for the whole organization, for a single account, or for a selected set of buckets.

Step 3: Configure Metrics
Select between the following options.

Free Metrics: Default, no additional charges.
Advanced Metrics & Recommendations: These include refined insights, prefix-level aggregation, and longer historical data at $0.20/month first 25 Billion and then over 100 billion at $0.12/month per million objects.
Step 4: Export Metrics (Optional)
Turn on reporting to export default dashboards to a specific S3 bucket for trend analysis.

Step 5: Review & Adjust
Data collection may take up to 48 hrs. After the population is surveyed, the immediate dashboard metrics are reviewed, and adjustments and configurations are made to the necessary changes. Click on “Create dashboard.”

Using S3 Storage Lens for Cost Optimization
The S3 Storage Lens tools offer a variety of features that significantly aid in cost reductions. Here’s how developers can maximize savings using the tool:
Identify Unnecessary Costs
Metrics such as "Incomplete Multipart Uploads" or "Unused Old Object Versions" highlight where storage costs are gathering too quickly and can easily be ignored at initial stages.
Apply Data Lifecycle Policies
Implement S3 Lifecycle Rules using data from the Storage Lens that will trigger data movement to cheaper storage classes (e.g., moving data from Glacier for archival).
Clean Up Unused Storage
Analyze the distribution of cold data using metrics and flag low-access objects for removal or archival.
Enhancing Data Protection with Storage Lens
No businesses should take risks with sensitive data information. These practices must be best secured by incorporating advanced methods of S3 Storage lens guarantees:
Protection metrics: Pinpoint which buckets lack encryption and apply it using the AWS key management service.
Replication Insights: Additional region replication of the important data will fortify redundancy.
Versioning Compliance: Enable S3 Versioning to recover data more effortlessly.
Overcoming Challenges
There may be challenges when implementing Storage Lens. Look at issues around:
Initial Complexity: The beginning stages of the setup might be too complex.
Advanced Fees: Overhead metrics are helpful in most contacts, but extra data comes at an expense. Use the advanced features one by one, depending on what is urgent.
Looking to Optimize Your S3 Storage Costs? Don’t Worry, We’ve Got You Covered!
Cost optimization strategies are critical for business growth and expansion. Startups and small businesses are often constrained, and spending excessive amounts of money on data storage might limit their opportunities for growth and expansion. On the flip side, small-scale reductions in storage costs go a long way in impacting the profits of larger companies.
What Pump Can Do To Lower Your S3 Storage Costs

Pump’s sophisticated AI algorithms analyze your storage usage and recommend cost-effective options. Here’s how it works:
Savings Summary: Pump’s AI extracts details of all possible savings and calculates their monetary implications. You can also see long-term savings ROI projections, demonstrating how storage optimization can bolster your financial results.
Automated Updates: Pump analyzes your AWS environment continuously to understand how storage strategies need to change over time. This ensures that your storage strategy is constantly optimized as your data usage and other requirements shift.
Say goodbye to wasted resources and hello to smarter, more efficient S3 storage with Pump. Let us help you save money and focus on growing your business!
Conclusion
Amazon S3 Storage Lens goes beyond serving as a dashboard – it’s intended to be your competitive edge. It can help cut storage expenses, strengthen data security, and boost performance, which is transformational for companies of all sizes.
Are you ready to elevate your cloud storage plan? Access the Amazon S3 Console now and transform the way you manage your data!