AWS Cost Management
Please use the menu below to navigate the article sections:
AWS offer a suite of cost management and billing tools that help you to understand and manage your costs, report on utilization, and trigger alarms when thresholds are met or exceeded.
AWS Cost Explorer
The AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool that allows you to view charts of your costs.
You can view cost data for the past 13 months and forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months.
Cost Explorer can be used to discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time and to identify cost problem areas.
Cost Explorer can help you to identify service usage statistics such as:
- Which services you use the most.
- View metrics for which AZ has the most traffic.
- Which linked account is used the most.
AWS Cost & Usage Report
Publish AWS billing reports to an Amazon S3 bucket.
Reports break down costs by:
- Hour, day, month, product, product resource, tags.
Can update the report up to three times a day.
Create, retrieve, and delete your reports using the AWS CUR API Reference.
AWS Price List API
Query the prices of AWS services.
Price List Service API (AKA the Query API) – query with JSON.
AWS Price List API (AKA the Bulk API) – query with HTML.
Alerts via Amazon SNS when prices change.
AWS Budgets
Used to track cost, usage, or coverage and utilization for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, across multiple dimensions, such as service, or Cost Categories.
Alerting through event-driven alert notifications for when actual or forecasted cost or usage exceeds your budget limit, or when your RI and Savings Plans’ coverage or utilization drops below your threshold.
Create annual, quarterly, monthly, or even daily budgets depending on your business needs.
To track the costs associated with projects and environments cost allocation tags should be applied to the relevant resources.
Cost allocation tags are used to track AWS costs on a detailed level.
After you activate cost allocation tags, AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report, to make it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs.
AWS Cost Categories
AWS Cost Categories is a feature within AWS Cost Management product suite that enables you to group cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on your needs.
You can create custom categories and map your cost and usage information into these categories based on the rules defined by you using various dimensions such as account, tag, service, charge type, and even other cost categories.
Once cost categories are set up and enabled, you will be able to view your cost and usage information by these categories starting at the beginning of the month in AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR).
