The set of cost reporting and monitoring tools provided by AWS is collectively referred to as Billing and Cost Management. With these tools, you can view your paid and unpaid bills, manage payment methods, and monitor and analyze your costs and usage.
How can you use Billing and Cost Management?
- Estimate and plan your AWS costs.
- Receive alerts if your costs exceed or approach a threshold.
- Assess your biggest investments in AWS resources.
- Streamline your accounting if you work with multiple AWS accounts.
This service offers a variety of features to help you manage AWS costs, but this course will focus on four that are commonly used by AWS customers. AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports can help you establish visibility into your cloud spending, while AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection can help avoid spending more than intended.
What is Cost Explorer?
Cost Explorer is a Cost Management feature you can use to visualize and better understand your costs and usage. After activating this service, you can review historical cost data spanning the last 12 months, and Cost Explorer can use that data to forecast how much you’re likely to spend for the next 12 months. You can view this data at a higher, overall level, or apply a diverse range of filters that empower you to dive deeper for detailed analysis.
What are Cost and Usage Reports?
AWS Cost and Usage Reports (sometimes referred to as AWS CUR) track your AWS usage and provide estimated charges for the account. The reports provide access to granular data, helping you to better analyze and understand your AWS costs, as well as the specific product offerings and usage amounts underlying those costs. Each report contains line items for each unique combination of AWS products, usage type, and operation that you use in your AWS account.
What is AWS Budgets?
AWS Budgets is a Cost Management feature you can use to track and manage your AWS costs. When you create a budget, you effectively create an upper boundary you would like your costs to remain within for a configured time period. You can track cost in depth by adding filters related to AWS services, member accounts, AWS Regions, tags, and more.
When you create a budget, you can define alert thresholds to notify you if costs reach a percentage of the defined budget amount, or an absolute value in the form of a dollar amount.
If your spending reaches a defined threshold, you can configure AWS Budgets to deliver notifications over email, as well as to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. You can configure AWS Budgets to deliver reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to monitor budget performance. You can also create Budget Actions to help control costs when approaching or exceeding a set budget, such as restricting users from creating additional resources.
What is AWS Cost Anomaly Detection?
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is an AWS Cost Management feature that uses machine learning to continuously monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spending. This tool can be used as another mitigating factor against receiving unexpected bills at the end of the month.