AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. It offers a set of default reports that you can use as a starting point for your analysis.
Key Features
- Historical Analysis: View cost and usage data for the past 12 months.
- Forecasting: Predict future spending for the next 12 months based on historical patterns.
- Granularity: View data by day, month, or even hour (if enabled).
- Filtering & Grouping: Group costs by Service, Region, Instance Type, or Tag (e.g., "Project: Beta").
- Saved Reports: Save your custom views as reports.
Exam Tips
[!IMPORTANT] Cost Explorer vs Budgets:
- Cost Explorer is for visualizing and analyzing trends ("Why was my bill high last month?" or "How much will I spend next month?").
- Budgets is for proactive alerting ("Stop me before I spend too much").
[!NOTE] Tags for Cost Allocation: To track costs by specific projects, teams, or environments (Dev vs Prod), you MUST use Cost Allocation Tags. You then activate them in the Billing Console to see them in Cost Explorer.
[!WARNING] Cost Explorer data is not real-time. It typically has a delay of approx 24 hours.
Common Use Cases
- Drill-down: Finding which specific EC2 instance type is driving up costs.
- Forecasting: estimating the bill for the next quarter.
- Reporting: Creating a monthly report of costs per department using Tags.