AWS Cost Explorer is an indispensable tool for anyone managing workloads on Amazon Web Services. It helps you understand and optimise your spending patterns by giving you clear visibility into how resources are consumed. If you’re looking to control costs in a cloud environment that can quickly become complex, AWS Cost Explorer is an essential resource.
At its core, Cost Explorer helps you analyze your usage and spending across your AWS environment. It enables you to dive into your cost and usage data, identify trends, and take action based on your insights. In this post, we’ll look at how you can leverage this tool to manage your AWS costs more effectively.
Understanding Cost Explorer’s Capabilities
When you first enable Cost Explorer, AWS begins by aggregating data about your spending for the current month, the past 12 months, and a forecast of the next 12 months. The tool gives you immediate access to key metrics like:
- Historical cost data: Up to 12 months, with a focus on trends.
- Forecasting: Predictions of future spending based on past usage.
- Insights: Identifying areas where your costs might be high or fluctuating unexpectedly.
The tool updates data every 24 hours, so your cost reports are refreshed regularly, ensuring you’re always working with the most up-to-date information.
What sets AWS Cost Explorer apart is its flexibility. You can view your cost and usage data in a variety of ways, depending on your needs. The main graph, the Cost Explorer Reports, and Reserved Instances (RI) Reports all provide different perspectives on your data, allowing you to customize your analysis according to your priorities.
Pragmatic Usage: Accessing, Filtering, and Analyzing Your Costs
Once you’ve enabled Cost Explorer, you can start exploring the data with a few simple steps. You can filter costs based on a range of criteria, from AWS service to region, instance type, or even specific tags.
*You can’t disable Cost Explorer after you enable it but you can stop incurring charges by blocking access to its API and stopping its use. You can stop API charges by blocking IAM policies with ce:* actions or other cost-generating API calls, and you can prevent user access by denying the ce:*action in their IAM policies.
Here’s how you get started:
- Log in to the AWS Management Console and open the Cost Explorer service from the Services menu.
- Choose your time range: Select from daily, monthly, or custom date ranges to drill down into specific periods of interest.
- Apply filters: AWS allows you to filter costs by various dimensions—whether you want to look at spending by service, instance type, or tags. Filters make it easy to pinpoint exactly where your spending is coming from.
- Use pre-configured reports: Reports like “Costs by Service” or “Daily Spend” offer instant insights, helping you see the most important trends at a glance.
You can also create custom reports, tailoring them to your unique needs. For example, you could build a report specifically for monitoring the costs of an individual project or team.
Visualization and Forecasting
Cost Explorer also offers powerful visualization features, which are particularly helpful when trying to grasp complex cost data at a glance. Graphs and charts make it easier to see trends, outliers, and other key insights. For instance, if you’re trying to assess your usage of EC2 instances or storage, graphs can reveal if you’re over-provisioned in certain areas, or if you’re spending on idle resources that could be reduced.
Another compelling feature is forecasting. AWS Cost Explorer analyzes historical data to predict your future spending patterns. This helps you make more informed decisions about budget planning and resource allocation. It can also suggest Reserved Instances (RIs) that could lead to cost savings based on your usage patterns.
Integrating Cost Explorer into Your Workflow
Cost Explorer isn’t just a tool for ad-hoc analysis. It’s something you should use regularly to keep your AWS spending in check. You can set up recurring reports, which gives you ongoing insight into how your costs are trending over time. This can also be useful for internal reporting, where stakeholders need regular updates on cloud costs.
If you need to share the findings from your reports with others, AWS makes it easy to export your data into CSV files. This is invaluable when presenting cost breakdowns to management or collaborating with other teams.
Finally, if you want to go deeper, the Cost Explorer API allows you to programmatically access your cost and usage data. Though each paginated API request comes with a small cost (around $0.01 per request), this flexibility can be useful for automating cost reporting or integrating Cost Explorer data with other tools.
Key Considerations
- Data Refresh Cycle: Your cost data is updated every 24 hours, though some data may take a little longer to update depending on the upstream billing systems. It’s important to keep this in mind when making real-time decisions.
- Cost of API Access: While the web interface is free to use, using the API incurs a charge of $0.01 per paginated request. This cost is negligible for light usage but can add up if you’re querying data frequently.
- Limitations of Data: When you first enable Cost Explorer, you’ll only see data for the current month and the past 12 months. If you need to go back further, you’ll have to use other tools like AWS Cost and Usage Reports.
A Tool for Better Cost Management
AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool for gaining visibility into your AWS spending and making informed decisions about resource allocation. By regularly using it, you can identify cost-saving opportunities, optimize your resource usage, and better manage your cloud budget.
While it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, Cost Explorer is a valuable addition to your cost management toolkit. With its flexible reporting, forecasting, and visualization features, it’s a key resource for anyone looking to optimize their cloud infrastructure and minimize unnecessary expenses.
Key Takeaways:
- Cost Explorer is free to use for visualizing and analyzing your AWS costs.
- You can filter and customize your reports to suit your needs.
- Forecasting and recommendations can help you make proactive decisions about Reserved Instances.
- Regular use can help you stay on top of your spending, while the API allows for deeper integration and automation.
Stay Clouding!
