AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a built-in tool that enables us to analyze, visualize, and export detailed cost and usage reports across your AWS account(s). It is a subset or section within the Billing and Cost Management Home. It provides:

  1. Graphical reports with breakdowns by service, linked account, usage type, or tag (e.g., user:username, department:finance).
  2. Support for cost forecasting based on historical usage.
  3. Easy filtering and grouping of data.
  4. Exporting to CSV for custom analysis.
  5. No additional setup required—ready to use in the AWS Billing dashboard.

cost-explorer

Question: Cost Explorer's granular filtering feature

A company observes an increase in Amazon EC2 costs in its most recent bill. The billing team notices unwanted vertical scaling of instance types for a couple of EC2 instances. A solutions architect needs to create a graph comparing the last 2 months of EC2 costs and perform an in-depth analysis to identify the root cause of the vertical scaling. How should the solutions architect generate the information with the LEAST operational overhead?

  1. Use AWS Budgets to create a budget report and compare EC2 costs based on instance types.
  2. Use Cost Explorer's granular filtering feature to perform an in-depth analysis of EC2 costs based on instance types. (Correct Ans)
  3. Use graphs from the AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard to compare EC2 costs based on instance types for the last 2 months.
  4. Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to create a report and send it to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon QuickSight with Amazon S3 as a source to generate an interactive graph based on instance types.

Explanation: Second option is the correct answer.

  1. AWS Cost Explorer allows graphical cost analysis supports filters for Service (EC2), Usage types and more.
  2. It's ready to use, requires no setup, and has low operational overhead, which is key to the question.
  3. It's ideal for quick comparisons and trends to investigate cost anomalies such as unwanted vertical scaling.

Why the Others Are Less Ideal?

  1. Use AWS Budgets: Budgets are for alerts and tracking against thresholds, not detailed analysis.
  2. Billing Dashboard Provide high-level summary of billing details. Bills do not break down by user.
  3. Use CUR + QuickSight: Technically powerful, but involves setup of S3 buckets, IAM, QuickSight, and data modeling.

Question: Cost Explorer and download report

At part of budget planning, management wants a report of AWS billed items listed by user. The data will be used to create department budgets. A solution architect needs to determine the most efficient way to obtain this report Information

Which solution meets these requirement?

  1. Run a query with Amazon Athena to generate the report.
  2. Create a report in Cost Explorer and download the report (Correct Answer)
  3. Access the bill details from the running dashboard and download Via bill.
  4. Modify a cost budget in AWS Budgets to alert with Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

Explanation:

  1. Cost Explorer allows to break down costs by user which is typically how users are identified in AWS billing.
  2. Cost Explorer can generate detailed reports of AWS usage and costs based on filters such as user, service, and linked account.
  3. Also, download these reports in CSV format, which can be used to create department budgets and track costs efficiently.

Why not other options?

  1. Athena: Can be done using data export but it requires more setup (set up S3, build Athena tables).
  2. Running dashboard: Provide high-level summary of billing details. Bills do not break down by user.
  3. AWS Budgets: AWS Budgets and SES are for alerts, not for generating detailed reports.