Gaining Visibility Into Cloud Spending

Cost Explorer

Cost Explorer is a Cost Management feature to visualise and better understand costs and usage. It can review historical cost data spanning the last 12 months and forecast likely spend for the next 12 months.

We can use Cost Explorer to identify spending areas that need further inquiry and see trends to understand our costs.

Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)

AWS CUR tracks AWS usage and provides estimated charges for the account. The reports provide access to granular data, helping us better analyse and understand AWS costs, as well as the specific product offerings and usage amounts underlying those costs.

Avoiding Overspend with AWS

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets is a Cost Management feature to track and manage AWS costs. When we create a budget, we effectively create an upper bound we would like our costs to remain within for a configured time period.

When a budget is created, we can define alert thresholds to notify if costs reach a percentage of the defined budget amount. If spending reaches a defined threshold, we can configure AWS Budgets to deliver notifications over email, as well as to an SNS topic.

Cost Anomaly Detection

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is an AWS Cost Management feature that uses ML to continously monitor cost and usage to detect unusual spending. This tool can be used as another mitigating factor against receiving unexpected bills.