AWS Cost Explorer – analyzing your costs and usage

Are you struggling to keep track and optimize your AWS cost? Looking for a simple way to gain control of your AWS cloud costs?
AWS Cost Explorer provides in-depth analysis and visualization of historical AWS costs and usage. You can start easily by creating custom reports to analyze your cost and usage data. You can look at the data broadly, like total costs and usage for all accounts, or dig deeper to find trends, identify cost drivers, and spot unusual patterns.

AWS Cost Explorer provides a user-friendly interface to help you visualize, analyze, and manage your cloud costs and usage over time. Using Cost Explorer allows you to explore your usage patterns and key cost drivers in detail. You can track monthly trends, customize your data analysis with flexible filtering and grouping options, and even save your custom reports, all within one tool.

You can view data from the past year, get recommendations for buying Reserved Instances, and predict your expenses for the next 1, 3, or 12 months. Cost Explorer helps you identify areas that need deeper analysis and provides insights into your spending. Additionally, you can set up predefined views to see general cost trends, making it easier to customize views according to your specific needs.

AWS Cost Explorer offers several features to help users manage and understand their AWS costs:

1. AWS Cost and usage visualization – It provides graphs and tables that visually display your AWS costs and usage over time, making it easier to analyze complex data.
2. Filter and group – You can filter and group your data in various ways, such as by member accounts or AWS services, to see who or what is driving your most cost. It helps you spot trends and changes in spending.
3. Multi-year history and cost and usage forecasting – AWS Cost Explorer lets you analyze up to 38 months of cost and usage data to spot trends and year-over-year changes. With that data, AWS Cost Explorer can predict future costs that help you budget and plan for upcoming expenses.
4. Hourly granularity – For more detailed insights, you can view your spending at an hourly level for the past 14 days, helping you monitor peak usage periods.
5. Saved reports -With AWS Cost Explorer, you can use pre-made reports to track costs for different AWS services and accounts. You can also save custom AWS Cost reports with filters for easy access later.
6. Resource-level granularity – AWS Cost Explorer allows you to track costs at a resource level data for all services at daily granularity, which helps identify cost drivers (except Amazon EC2, which offers hourly insights). Customers can enable this additional data for the past 14 days.
7. Download your CE view in CSV format – You can download filtered CE view data as CSV files for offline use or sharing.
8. API access – AWS Cost Explorer provides programmatic access to all features through API, enabling automation of Cost Management tasks.

You can enable Cost Explorer for your account using this procedure on the Billing and Cost Management console (you can’t enable Cost Explorer using the API). Once enabled, AWS prepares your cost data for the current month and the past 12 months, and provides a forecast for the next 12 months. The data for the current month becomes available within 24 hours, while older data may take a few days to process. AWS Cost Explorer updates your cost data at least once every 24 hours.

Once your cost and usage data is available, you can access key information like month-to-date costs, forecasted expenses, and trends through the overview dashboard. It also provides a summary of current and past month costs, helping you check if your spending aligns with expectations. The Monthly Trends feature highlights any unusual usage compared to previous months.

• Login to AWS Management Console
• In the search bar type Billing and Cost Management and find Cost Explorer

If you are using AWS Cost Explorer for the first time, you’ll need to enable it. Just click on the “Enable Cost Explorer” button. Once AWS Cost Explorer is activated, it cannot be deactivated.

Now you see AWS Cost Explorer dashboard that contains different charts and options for viewing your AWS costs.

• Custom reports parameters
  In the right side of the screen, you can select the time period, granularity, dimension, and filters for which you want to view and analyze costs.
• The forecast feature
  Additionally, you can use the forecast feature to get an idea of what your future 1-month, 3-month, and 12-month costs might look like based on the past three years’ usage.

• Download your report as CSV
  You can download your report in CSV file format for offline access and share it with other team members.

AWS Cost Explorer plays a crucial role in AWS cost optimization. With insights into AWS costs, you can make smarter purchasing decisions and reduce unnecessary expenses. By analyzing historical usage and identifying cost drivers, you can optimize your AWS costs effectively.
With in-depth knowledge of AWS, Sysbee can recommend cost-saving measures, and set up monitoring solutions to track AWS cost trends and usage in real time, notifying you of unusual patterns, inefficiencies, or potential savings opportunities. With our support, your infrastructure is always optimized, secure, scalable and cost-effective.