AWS BILLING & COST MANAGEMENT TUTORIAL — PART 2 (Cost Explorer)
Hello everyone, In this part of “AWS BILLING & COST MANAGEMENT TUTORIAL”, I am going to discuss about the Cost Explorer in AWS.
Before going on to the details of how you can analyse data from Cost Explorer. Let us know something about what Cost Explorer is.
- Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to view & analyse your cost & usage.
- You can explore your usage & costs using the main graph, the Cost Explorer cost & usage reports or the cost explorer RI reports.
- You can view data for up to the last 12 months, forecast how much you’re likely to spend for the next 12 months & get recommendations for what Reserved Instances to purchase.
- You can use Cost Explorer to identify areas that need further inquiry & see trends that you can use to understand your cost.
- It is a free to use service. You can use Cost Explorer UI for free.
- But it can incur charges when using it through API.
- You can’t disable Cost Explorer after you enable it.
Navigating to Cost Explorer
Just search for Cost Explorer on the search bar and you will find it easily.
Enabling Cost Explorer
To enable cost explorer just open the cost explorer using the process mentioned above.
If it was your first time you will get screen something like this
And you have to wait for up to 24 hours to it activated. Once it get activated all the data will get displayed to you.
Analysing data on Cost Explorer dashboard
On Cost Explorer (Cost Management) home the following data will be displayed:
- Current Month Cost
- Month end forecast
- Daily Cost
- Trends by month
I am going to discuss each one by one.
Firstly have a look of the cost explorer home dashboard, so you can have better idea.
Current Month Cost
Current month costs shows the usage cost of your AWS account for the current month till the current day.
It also shows you the percentage increase on your AWS account usage cost as compared to previous month.
Forecasted Month End Costs
Forecasted month end cost predict the usage cost of your AWS account for the whole month or till the end of the month.
It is just the prediction and cannot be always same as the actual month end cost.
Daily Unblended Costs
Unblended costs represent your usage costs on the day they are charged to you.
Here you can get the data of the cost that is charged to you for each day of the current month till the current day.
Trends By Month
Here you can see the trends related to your usage for the current month till the current day.
This is all for this article. In the next article I am going to discuss advance usage of cost explorer, reports, budgets etc.
I you have any questions related to the topic, you can ask me in the comment section.
