Visualise, comprehend, and control your AWS expenses and consumption over time using AWS Cost Explorer.
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
You can visualise, comprehend, and control your AWS expenses and consumption over time with the help of AWS Cost Explorer’s user-friendly interface. Create custom reports that examine consumption and cost data to get started fast. To find trends, identify cost drivers, and spot anomalies, you can either do a high-level analysis of your data (e.g., total costs and usage across all accounts) or delve deeper into your cost and usage data.
Advantages
Preconfigured views
Obtain use and expense data, as well as business insights using predefined views.
Sorting and classifying
Examine your expenses and use information in detail using grouping and filtering.
Forecast of costs and use
For your report, make a usage and expense projection for a future time frame.
Make your own reports
To examine various data sets, create, save, and distribute custom reports.
How it operates
This process on the Billing and Cost Management portal will allow you to activate Cost Explorer for your account. Cost Explorer cannot be enabled using the API. Once Cost Explorer is enabled, AWS compiles your cost information for the last 12 months and the current month before estimating your expenses for the upcoming 12 months. Within a day or so, you can access the data for the current month. It takes a couple more days for the remaining data. Your cost information is updated by Cost Explorer at least once every 24 hours.
Use cases
Create unique applications
Benefit from direct access to AWS Cost Explorer’s interactive, ad hoc analytics engine. You may programmatically query your cost and use data using the Cost Explorer API.
Apply granular filtering
Manage, comprehend, and visualise your AWS expenses and use on a daily or monthly basis. By turning on hourly and resource level granularity, you may also access your statistics with even more detail.
Estimate your expenses
Choose a future time frame for your report and make a forecast. Your AWS cost can be estimated using a forecast, and you can use it to set budgets and alarms.
Recognise use trends and costs
Determine trends through cost and consumption analysis on a daily, monthly, or annual basis. Use tables and graphs to compare AWS consumption and cost over time in order to spot variations.
Utilise natural language to analyse expense data
Use Amazon Q Developer‘s natural language feature to comprehend and evaluate your AWS expenses. Request information such as “Which region had the largest cost increase last month?” and “What were my highest-cost services last quarter?” and get conversational, understandable answers.
How to Begin Using Amazon Cost Explorer
Cost Explorer can be started using the AWS Cost Management console once it has been enabled.
To launch Cost Explorer
Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/costmanagement/home to access the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
This brings up the Cost dashboard, which displays the following information:
- Your projected expenses for the current month
- Your anticipated monthly expenses
- A daily cost graph
- Your top five cost trends
- A list of the reports you have recently looked at
Features
Monitor, comprehend, and control your AWS expenses and consumption over time.
Visualisation of Cost and Usage
Through the use of graphs and tables, AWS Cost Explorer gives users a visual depiction of their AWS usage and costs over time. Analysing complicated cost and consumption data is made easier by visualisation, which promotes prompt insights and well-informed choices.
Group and Filter
Your data can be sorted and filtered using a number of different criteria. For instance, you can see your monthly or daily expenses sorted by member accounts to see who is responsible for the majority of your expenses. Additionally, you can filter costs by a particular service to see how the spend for that service has changed over time, and you can group your costs by services to view the top 9 cost-accruing AWS services in the Cost Explorer graph and view a detailed breakdown of costs per service in the table.
Forecasting costs and use
Based on your past and present cost and consumption patterns, AWS Cost Explorer can forecast future expenses and usage. This aids businesses in budgeting and planning for future costs.
Reports Saved
It offers preset reports to track monthly expenses by service, connected account, EC2 running hours, daily expenses, and AWS Marketplace expenses. Customers can also store their own Cost Explorer reports for convenient access, complete with filters and groupings.
History spanning several years
With up to 38 months of history, users can analyse multi-year historical data at a monthly granularity to identify trends and year-over-year variations in their AWS usage and cost.
Hourly detail
Customers can view their spending over the last 14 days at the most detailed hourly level with Cost Explorer. To identify the proper SP/RI commitment or comprehend peak hour usage, you can keep an eye on your hourly cost and utilisation.
Granularity at the resource level
Customers can identify cost factors by using Cost Explorer to track their AWS costs and usage at the resource level. All services’ resource level data is supported by Cost Explorer at a daily resolution, while EC2 resource level data is supported at an hourly granularity. For the last 14 days, customers can allow this extra data.
Get your CE view in a CSV file
For convenient sharing with other team members and offline access, you can download your filtered CE view in CSV file format.
Access via API
Tasks related to cost management can be automated with AWS Cost Explorer’s programmatic access to all functionalities via API.
Use Q Developer to access Cost Explorer data
Using Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console, you can enquire about your AWS expenses.
AWS Cost Explorer Cost
AWS Cost Explorer API
The interactive, ad-hoc query engine that drives AWS Cost Explorer is immediately accessible through the AWS Cost Explorer API. The fee for each request is $0.01.
Level of Detail in AWS Cost Explorer Hourly
It has two capabilities that allow hourly granularity, spanning 14 days: 1) EC2 resource level data and 2) cost and consumption statistics for all services without resource level details. At a daily fee of $0.00000033 per usage record (or $0.01 per 1,000 usage records per month), Cost Explorer provides hourly granularity. A line item with a certain resource and usage type is matched by a usage record. For instance, at the hourly granularity, a single EC2 instance operating for 24 hours will produce 24 unique consumption reports daily.
You receive daily bills from Cost Explorer based on the total number of hourly usage records that have been stored there during the previous 14 days. For example, Cost Explorer will host 336 records (24 hours x 14 days) per day and charge you $0.0001 ($0.00000033 per record X 336 records) per day if you have hourly granularity enabled and have been running one EC2 instance all day every day for the past month. This will result in a monthly bill of $0.003 ($0.0001 daily charge X 30 days).
You can view data at hourly granularity in three reports Cost Explorer, Savings Plans Utilisation, and Savings Plans Coverage reports once hourly granularity is enabled. The number of reports you use hourly granularity in has no bearing on your cost. Using hourly granularity in one or all three reports will result in the same cost.