The AWS Cost Management console has features that you can use for budgeting and forecasting costs and methods for you to optimize your pricing to reduce your overall AWS bill.
The AWS Cost Management console is integrated closely with the Billing console. Using both together, you can manage your costs in a holistic manner. You can use Billing console resources to manage your ongoing payments, and AWS Cost Management console resources to optimize your future costs. For information about AWS resources to understand, pay, or organize your AWS bills, see the AWS Billing User Guide.
With the AWS Cost Management console and the Billing console, you can do the following tasks.
Features of AWS Cost Management
AWS Cost Explorer
Use case: Report, Forecast, Inspect
AWS Cost Explorer is a feature that you can use to visualize your cost data for further analysis. Using it, you can filter graphs by several different values. This includes Availability Zone, AWS service, and AWS Region, It also includes other specifics such as custom cost allocation tag, Amazon EC2 instance type, and purchase option. If you use consolidated billing, you can also filter by member account. In addition, you can see a forecast of future costs based on your historical cost data.
Documentation: Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer
AWS BudgetsUse case: Forecast, Inspect
AWS Budgets tracks your AWS usage and costs. AWS Budgets uses the cost visualization that's provided by AWS Cost Explorer to show the status of your budgets. This provides forecasts of your estimated costs and tracks your AWS usage, including your AWS Free Tier usage. You can also use AWS Budgets to create Amazon Simple Notification Service [Amazon SNS] notifications for when you exceed your budgeted amounts, or when your estimated costs exceed your budgets.
Documentation: Managing your costs with AWS Budgets
AWS Cost Anomaly DetectionUse case: Control
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a feature that uses machine learning to continuously monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spends. You can receive alerts individually in aggregated reports, and receive alerts in an email or an Amazon SNS topic. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is beneficial to analyze and determine the root cause of the anomaly, and identify the factor that is driving the cost increase.
Documentation: Detecting unusual spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Rightsizing RecommendationsUse case: Control
Rightsizing recommendations is a feature that reviews your historical Amazon EC2 usage for the past 14 days to identify opportunities for greater cost and usage efficiency. The feature identifies cost saving opportunities by downsizing or terminating instances in Amazon EC2.
Documentation: Accessing Reserved Instance Recommendations
Savings PlansUse case: Purchase
Savings Plans offers a flexible pricing model that provides savings on AWS usage. Savings Plans provide savings beyond On-Demand rates in exchange for a commitment of using a specified amount of compute power [measured every hour] for a one or three year period. You can manage your plans by using recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts in AWS Cost Explorer.
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Key Features
Access
Access detailed information about your AWS costs and usage
The AWS Billing Console gives you access to the most comprehensive information about your AWS costs and usage. To see how your costs are tracking month-to-date, and which AWS services are the main cost drivers, check out the AWS Billing Dashboard. To access to the most comprehensive information about your AWS costs and usage, you can download the AWS Cost & Usage Report.
To view your bill for any previous month, you can access the Bills page.
Products: AWS Cost & Usage Report, Billing Dashboard, Bills page
Organize
Organize your AWS costs across business lines
You can use cost allocation tags to allocate your costs along your organizational structure [e.g., apply a specific tag to indicate whether a resource belongs to your production, test, or development environments]. Using the AWS Billing Console, you can activate your resource tags for cost allocation to help you better understand your cost drivers.
Once a resource tag is activated for cost allocation, it will appear in Cost Explorer as an available filtering or grouping dimension, and as a column in the AWS Cost & Usage Report.
Products: AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost & Usage Report, cost allocation tags
Understand
Understand your underlying cost drivers and usage trends
The AWS Bills Page lists the costs that you incurred over the past month for each AWS service, with a further breakdown by AWS region and linked account. From there, you can dive deeper into your costs and usage trends using AWS Cost Explorer, which allows you to filter and group your data for adhoc analysis. You can track your Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances [RIs] using the out-of-the-box RI Utilization & Coverage Reports in AWS Cost Explorer.
For the most detailed information regarding your AWS costs and usage, download the AWS Cost & Usage Report.
Products: AWS Cost Explorer, Reserved Instance Reports, AWS Bills Page, AWS Cost & Usage Report
Control
Control your AWS costs and usage with AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets lets you set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when those thresholds are exceeded. Each budget can have up to five associated alerts that can be sent to up to ten email subscribers and/or published to an Amazon Simple Notification Service [SNS] topic.
Products: AWS Budgets
Optimize
Optimize your AWS costs and usage
Using AWS Cost Explorer, you can cross-reference your costs and usage to determine which usage types accrue the most cost, and take corrective action. The Reserved Instance Reports give you deep insight into your RI utilization and coverage, enabling you to identify opportunities for converting, modifying, and expanding your RI fleet.