Welcome to Tim! (Also known as the Taloflow Instance Manager)

Tim provides real-time cost and usage monitoring of your AWS resources.

When you start using Tim, our onboarding will walk you through that major components in the dashboard. We will teach you how to interpret the cost metrics and graph data, as well as how to view, manage and configure your AWS resources from the Resources page.

1. Create your account

Start off at https://tim.taloflow.ai/login, and create an account. If you're being forced to go through onboarding, feel free to skip it and refer to this document instead.

2. Connect your cloud

Once in the dashboard, go to the Overview page (you can select it from the sidebar).

3. Start monitoring

Live cost graph

In the Overview page, the first thing you will see is the "Live cost graph". This is graphing Tim's real-time cost metric that is filterable by different tags, resource types, and individual resources, and you can toggle different windows of time. This is powerful because it lets you know exactly what your infrastructure is costing you (instantaneous cost) without having to wait for AWS' intermittent billing to update.

Most costly tags

The "Most costly tags" table gives you a quick look at high-spending tag groups. Clicking “see all” will take you to the Resources page where the expanded view of the table will be sorted by cost-per-hour.

Least engaged resources

The "Least engaged resources" table gives you a quick look at what are usually poorly optimized resources based on Tim's Engagement Score Metrics. Clicking “see all” will take you to the Resources page where the expanded view of the table will be sorted by cost-per-hour.

4. Filter & Select Resources

Now, from the sidebar, select the Resources tab so we can move onto the Resources page. Here, you'll see a list of resources that are available for cost management with the various cost tags assigned to them. Look under the Status column and check the box next to a single "running" resource that you have personally identified is no longer needed.

5. Perform an Action

Click the Stop button in the top-right to stop the selected resource from running. It will take a few moments (sometimes minutes depending on the kind of resource and your AWS configuration), but the Status will change to "stopped".

6. Trigger a Recommendation (example)

Another powerful feature of Tim is that it can drive cost-saving insights for you. Usually, Tim monitors your AWS account over some time to identify resource candidates that should be Stopped, Terminated or Napped -- a more flexible strategy to schedule your resources. To demonstrate this functionality, you can trigger a Recommendation from the dashboard by clicking on the Demo from the sidebar and then selecting any one of the available flows by clicking on "Trigger Slack notification". Once clicked, switch to your Slack account channel where you've integrated with Tim to see the Recommendation and approve one of the presented options.

And that's it! You're now familiar with the major components of the dashboard that allows us to employ sound AWS cost management strategies and approve automations through a Slack channel. Taloflow also keeps a detailed audit log of everything that happens in your tools. You can check them out by going back to the dashboard and clicking on the Activity tab.