Efficient cost management is vital for organizations leveraging AWS cloud services. AWS provides robust tools designed to help users monitor, control, and optimize their cloud spending—specifically, AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets.
These tools equip users with detailed cost and usage insights, projections, and alerting capabilities, enabling proactive financial governance and decision-making.
Introduction to AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a user-friendly analytics tool that visualizes, tracks, and helps analyze AWS costs and usage over time. Once enabled, it provides access to up to 13 months of historical cost data and forecasts up to 12 future months based on usage trends.
Cost Explorer’s interactive dashboards allow users to identify cost drivers, explore spending patterns, and detect anomalies across multiple dimensions such as service, region, or linked accounts.
Core Features of AWS Cost Explorer include:
1. Cost and Usage Visualization: Graphs and tables display daily, monthly, or hourly spending and usage patterns, enabling easy comprehension of spending trends and resource consumption.
2. Filtering and Grouping: Allows filtering by specific services, cost categories, linked accounts, regions, and tags to pinpoint where costs are highest or changing.
3. Forecasting: Uses historical data to predict future costs and usage, aiding budget planning and resource optimization.
4. Preconfigured and Custom Reports: Provides built-in reports for common use cases and allows saving custom report configurations for consistent monitoring.
5. Resource-Level Granularity: Supports granular cost views down to individual resource identifiers for fine-tuned analysis.
6. API Access: Enables programmatic retrieval of cost and usage data for integration into third-party tools or custom dashboards.
Introduction to AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets complements Cost Explorer by allowing users to set specific spending or usage thresholds and receive notifications when approaching or exceeding defined limits.
This proactive monitoring helps prevent unexpected charges and encourages adherence to cost controls.
Key Capabilities of AWS Budgets:
1. Budget Types: Create cost budgets, usage budgets, or reservation utilization/purchase budgets to track specific financial or operational goals.
2. Threshold Alerts: Configure alerts to notify stakeholders via email or Amazon SNS when costs or usage approach or exceed set thresholds.
3. Flexible Budgeting Parameters: Budgets can be filtered by service, linked account, tag, or cost category to focus control on targeted areas.
4. Integration with Cost Explorer: Budget data integrates with Cost Explorer for detailed budget-to-actual comparisons and drilling down into variances.
AWS Cost Explorer vs AWS Budgets
| Feature | AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Budgets |
| Primary Function | Cost visualization and analysis | Budget creation and alerting |
| Data Range | Up to 13 months of historical and 12 months of forecast | Configurable for specific time periods |
| Granularity | Service, account, resource level | Service, account, cost category, tags |
| Alerts | None directly integrates with Budgets for alerts | Email and SNS notifications |
| Reporting | Preconfigured and custom reports | Budget tracking and variance reporting |
| API Access | Yes | Yes |
