AWS Cost Explorer

The AWS Cost Explorer service, which falls under the umbrella of the AWS Billing and Cost Management service, can be used for the purpose of exploring costs on our AWS accounts.

Introduction to Cost Explorer

The AWS Cost Explorer service is responsible for visualizing, understanding, and managing AWS costs and the resources associated with them over a period of time.

We can also generate Cost Explorer reports to evaluate cost and resource usage data. It helps us view our overall expenses or dive into details to find what’s driving costs and spot any unusual spending patterns. Here are some key aspects of the AWS Cost Explorer service:

• Visualization: Graphical representation of AWS spending and usage.

• Custom reports: Ability to create tailored reports on costs and usage.

• Detailed analysis: Options to analyze data at both high level and in-depth.

• Cost trends: Insights into spending trends over time.

• Cost drivers identification: Identification of main factors contributing to AWS costs.

Cost Explorer reports

AWS Cost Explorer reports provide detailed insights into our AWS spending and usage. AWS Cost Explorer reports can be of the following types:

General reports

The report on cost and usage reports comprehensively explains our total AWS costs and usage. It allows extensive filtering and analysis across all AWS services to understand various aspects of our AWS spending. This is the default report type recommended by AWS.

• AWS Marketplace: This report displays our total spending on the AWS Marketplace.

• Daily costs: This report displays our daily spending on our account for the last six months. Additionally, it offers forecasts for the next month.

• Monthly costs by linked account: This report displays our monthly spending for the last six months based on a group of linked AWS accounts. Additionally, it mentions the top five specifically, while all other services are aggregated in a single group.

• Monthly costs by service: This report displays our monthly spending for the last six months based on all the AWS services we used. Additionally, it mentions the top five specifically, while all other services are aggregated in a single group.

• Monthly EC2 running hours costs and usage: This report displays our total spending on our active, reserved instances.

Savings Plans reports

The Savings Plans reports report contains the following information:

• Savings Plans utilization: This report displays how effectively we’re using our Savings Plans, allowing us to set and compare against utilization targets.

• Savings Plans coverage: This report shows us insights into our overall Savings Plans coverage and lets us set coverage targets, helping us identify areas where we could save more.

Reservation reports

The reservation report contains the following information:

• Reservation utilization: This report details how well we’re utilizing our Reserved Instances (RIs) and allows for setting utilization targets to maximize their use.

• Reservation coverage: This report provides a view of our overall RI coverage and enables us to set coverage targets, highlighting potential savings opportunities.

Use cases

Here are some use cases of the AWS Cost Explorer service:

• We can view and analyze our AWS account’s historical AWS costs and usage patterns, helping us understand where the incurred costs come from and identify trends over time.

• Programmatically query and access cost and resource usage data with the help of the Cost Explorer API service.

• We can better understand costs by using resource-level filters and setting the appropriate time period.

• We can leverage AWS Cost Explorer to forecast future costs and, based on these, use AWS Budgets to set up alarms and budgets.

• We can understand cost and usage patterns by leveraging cost-based graphs and tables generated by AWS Cost Explorer.

This lesson taught us how to visualize, understand, and manage costs incurred on our AWS account with the AWS Cost Explorer service.