Cost Management ¶

The set of cost reporting and monitoring tools provided by AWS is collectively referred to as Billing and Cost Management. With these tools, you can view your paid and unpaid bills, manage payment methods, and monitor and analyze your costs and usage.

The Cost Management console is integrated closely with the Billing console, and you can use both together to manage your costs in a holistic manner. You can use Billing console resources to manage ongoing payments and generate reports, while using Cost Management console resources to optimize future costs.

Using Billing and Cost Management¶

Estimate and plan your AWS costs.
Receive alerts if your costs exceed or approach a threshold.
Assess your biggest investments in AWS resources.
Streamline your accounting if you work with multiple AWS accounts.

Cost Explorer¶

Cost Explorer is a Cost Management feature you can use to visualize and better understand your costs and usage. After activating this service, you can review historical cost data spanning the last 12 months, and Cost Explorer can use that data to forecast how much you're likely to spend for the next 12 months. You can view this data at a higher, overall level, or apply a diverse range of filters that empower you to dive deeper for detailed analysis.

Cost and Usage Reports¶

You can customize the content and delivery of your reports, and manage them from the Cost and Usage Reports page of the AWS Billing Dashboard. Cost and Usage Reports are published to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you own, and you can configure the report to automatically update the .csv file once each day.

AWS Budgets¶

AWS Budgets is a Cost Management feature you can use to track and manage your AWS costs. When you create a budget, you effectively create an upper boundary you would like your costs to remain within for a configured time period. You can track cost in depth by adding filters related to AWS services, member accounts, AWS Regions, tags, and more.

Cost Anomaly Detection¶

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is an AWS Cost Management feature that uses machine learning to continuously monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spending. This tool can be used as another mitigating factor against receiving unexpected bills at the end of the month.