Pal

Pal is a tool for automating simple tabular data analysis. It provides just enough features to be useful. It has been primarily designed to assist with cloud billing reports, but can work generically across any tabular CSV file.

• Reporting as Code: Describe simple routines to extract, filter and manipulate data from spreadsheets.
  • Quickly filter, manipulate and transform your spreadsheet into consumable, understandable insight using one or more provided export functions (including CSV, chart, table, interactive report).
  • Export filtered data into common data formats for further analysis or visualisation in a different tool.
  • Run, version and share report template definitions with others.
• Plugins: Extend Pal hooks with your own functionality. Read more about it here.

Use Cases

Common use cases are:

• Analyse data using a "write once, run any time" templating approach [see examples below].
• Analysing cloud spend can be a complex task, use Pal to help start the conversation or drill deep into specifics.
• Automate the break down of large and unwieldy provider spreadsheets into more digestable and "Excel friendly" files.

Usage

Two things are needed to run Pal, the spreadsheet and a template file. Optionally, you can provide an output directory, otherwise it will use /tmp/pal.

Provide these to Pal as arguments as follows:

$ pal -t /file/path/to/template.json -s /file/path/to/billing_file.csv -o /my/output/folder

Example

Below shows the template and export from a simple request.

It shows grouping all records from an AWS Cost and Usage Report by product and usage type, summing blended cost fields.

Template

{
  ...
  "filters":  {
    "condition": "AND",
    "rules": [{
        "field": "lineItem/BlendedCost",
        "type": "number",
        "operator": "greater",
        "value": 0
      }
    ]
  },
  "exporter" : {
    "types" : [{
      "name" : "table",
      ...
    }],
    "properties" : [
      "lineItem/ProductCode",
      "lineItem/UsageType",
      "lineItem/BlendedCost"
    ],
    "actions" : {
      "group_by" : ["lineItem/ProductCode", "lineItem/UsageType"],
      "sort_by" : "sum_lineItem/BlendedCost",
      "projection" : {
        "type" : "sum",
        "property" : "lineItem/BlendedCost"
      }
    }
  }
}

Find full template here.

Exported

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                     AWS CUR Product/Usage Type Combined Costs                      |
+----------------------+----------------------------------+--------------------------+
| lineItem/ProductCode | lineItem/UsageType               | sum_lineItem/BlendedCost |
+----------------------+----------------------------------+--------------------------+
| AmazonEC2            | APS2-EBS:VolumeUsage.gp2         | 48.80                    |
| AmazonRDS            | APS2-RDS:ChargedBackupUsage      | 8.12                     |
| AmazonEC2            | APS2-ElasticIP:IdleAddress       | 6.71                     |
| AmazonEC2            | APS2-EBS:SnapshotUsage           | 5.64                     |
...

Understand more about how templates work by clicking here.

Installation

Install it yourself as:

$ gem install pal

Getting started quickly

To quickly spin up a development environment, please use the Dockerfile provided. Run:

$ docker build -t pal .
$ docker run -it --rm pal bash

Please do not forget to mount any volumes which may have templates that you wish to use. Default templates are available too, found under /app/templates.

Once set up and connected to your container, run:

$ pal -t /file/path/to/template.json -s /file/path/to/billing_file.csv -o /my/output/folder

Upcoming changes

1. Provide the ability to format exports

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/williamthom-as/pal. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Pal project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.