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AWS Cost Explorer

What is it​

A tool that allows you to visualize and analyze your AWS costs and usage over time.

What it's for​

Understand your AWS spending, identify cost trends, forecast future expenses, and optimize your costs.

Use cases​

  • Analysis of costs and usage by service, region, tags, etc.
  • Identification of cost spikes and anomalies.
  • Forecasting future expenses based on historical data.
  • Analysis of reserved instance (RI) and savings plan reports.
  • Creation of custom reports for different stakeholders.

Key points​

  • Visualization: Presents graphs and tables to facilitate understanding of costs.
  • Filtering and grouping: Allows filtering and grouping cost data by various dimensions.
  • Cost forecasting: Offers cost forecasts for the coming months.
  • RI/Savings Plans reports: Helps optimize the use of RIs and Savings Plans.
  • Free: It's a free AWS service.

Comparison​

  • AWS Cost Explorer vs. AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR): Cost Explorer is an interactive tool for cost visualization and analysis, ideal for quickly and visually exploring and understanding spending. Focused on historical analysis and forecasting. The CUR provides a comprehensive and detailed dataset about your AWS costs and usage, delivered to an S3 bucket, ideal for deeper analysis, integration with other BI tools, and automation of billing processes, but requires more effort to set up and analyze.