Cost visibility matters!
Understanding costs is crucial, whether you're using AWS cloud or on-premises environments. In the cloud, usage can change dynamically to meet customer needs, leading to potential cost increases. For example, you might need two servers one day and seven larger servers the next day due to traffic changes.
Cost visibility is key to grasping the value of a cloud environment, which can frequently evolve. By using AWS tools to establish visibility and manage spending in advance, you can better optimize cloud value for your organization.
How can you use AWS Billing and Cost Management?
AWS offers a suite of tools called Billing and Cost Management. These tools allow you to view your bills, manage payment methods, and monitor and analyze your costs and usage.
Assess your biggest investments in AWS Resources
Estimate and plan your costs
Receive alerts if your AWS costs exceed a threshold
This service offers various features to help manage AWS costs, but this article focuses on four commonly used by AWS customers.
Establish visibility
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
Prevent overspend
AWS Budgets
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
What is Cost Explorer?
Cost Explorer is a feature that helps you visualize and understand your AWS costs and usage. After activation, you can review historical cost data from the past 12 months and forecast expenses for the next 12 months. This tool allows you to view data at a high level or apply various filters for detailed analysis.
Cost Explorer helps identify areas of spending that need further investigation and highlights trends for better cost understanding. You can access it for free via the Cost Explorer user interface in the console or programmatically through the Cost Explorer API.
When to use Cost Explorer?
Cost Explorer is most effective for visualizing and understanding your costs over time through various charts. The filters and grouping options help isolate specific charges to identify unexpected costs. The forecasting feature predicts future charges based on historical usage data.
What is AWS Cost and Usage Reports?
(The Cost and Usage Reports legacy page will be deprecated soon, you can use Data Exports to export your usage reports)
AWS Cost and Usage Reports track your AWS usage and provide estimated charges for your account. These reports offer granular data, helping you analyze and understand your AWS costs and the specific product offerings and usage amounts behind those costs. Each report includes line items for each unique combination of AWS products, usage types, and operations in your account.
For more details about Cost Explorer, visit:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-exploring-data.html
When to use Cost and Usage Reports?
The Cost and Usage Reports are highly useful for running custom queries on cost data or building custom reporting applications. Their extreme granularity helps investigate extraordinary costs if they arise.
For more details about Cost and Usage Reports, visit:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/cur-create.html
What is AWS Budgets?
AWS Budgets is a Cost Management feature that helps you track and manage your AWS costs. By creating a budget, you set an upper limit for your costs over a specified period. You can track costs in detail by adding filters for AWS services, member accounts, regions, tags, and more. For instance, you might monitor the monthly spending for a development environment with a specific tag attached to each resource.
When you create a budget, you can define alert thresholds to notify you if costs reach a certain percentage or a specific dollar amount of the defined budget.
If your spending reaches a threshold, AWS Budgets can send notifications via email or an Amazon SNS topic. You can configure AWS Budgets to deliver reports daily, weekly, or monthly to monitor budget performance. Additionally, you can create Budget Actions to control costs when nearing or exceeding a set budget, such as restricting users from creating additional resources.
For more details about setting up the AWS Budget, visit:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-managing-costs.html
What is AWS Cost Anomaly Detection?
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a free Cost Management feature that uses machine learning to monitor your costs and usage continuously, detecting unusual spending. This tool helps mitigate the risk of unexpected bills at the end of the month.
AWS automatically configures Cost Anomaly Detection as part of the process for activating Cost Explorer.
For more details about Cost Anomaly Detection, visit:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/getting-started-ad.html
Conclusion
Maximize the value of the cloud by increasing cost visibility:
Use AWS Cost Explorer to establish cost and usage visibility, and visualize charges with interactive charts.
Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to conduct deep dives into your costs with extreme granularity, or to collect raw data for further analysis.
Use AWS Budgets to set spending limits, configure alerts, and take action when costs and usage deviate from expectations.
Use AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to detect and address anomalous spending using root cause analysis.
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