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Introduction
AWS Cost Explorer is one of the most valuable and underutilized tools available to AWS users. It provides a rich set of capabilities for visualizing, understanding, and managing your AWS costs and usage over time. Yet many organizations barely scratch the surface of what Cost Explorer can do. This comprehensive guide shows you how to leverage Cost Explorer to gain complete visibility into and control over your AWS spending.
Getting Started with Cost Explorer
Cost Explorer must be enabled before you can use it, and it provides up to 12 months of historical data plus forecasts for the next 12 months. Enable it from the Billing and Cost Management console.
The default view shows your total AWS costs over the last six months. From here, you can add filters, change the time range, group by different dimensions, and drill into specific services or accounts.
Key Cost Explorer Features
Filtering and Grouping: Slice your costs by service, linked account, region, Availability Zone, instance type, purchase option, or any tag you have applied to your resources. These dimensions can be combined to create highly specific views of your spending.
Savings Plans and RI Recommendations: Cost Explorer analyzes your historical usage and recommends Savings Plans and Reserved Instance purchases that would reduce your costs. These recommendations are remarkably accurate and easy to implement.
Anomalies Detection: AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to automatically detect unusual spending patterns and alerts you when your costs deviate from expected patterns.
Creating Useful Cost Reports
Build saved reports in Cost Explorer for your most common analysis needs. Useful reports include: daily spend by service for quick anomaly detection, monthly spend by team using tags for chargeback, EC2 On-Demand vs. Savings Plan coverage to identify commitment gaps, and data transfer costs breakdown by direction and service.
Schedule report delivery via email so stakeholders receive regular cost updates without needing to log into the console.
Understanding Cost Forecast
Cost Explorer’s forecasting capability uses machine learning to predict your future costs based on your historical usage patterns. These forecasts are particularly useful for budget planning and identifying whether you are on track to meet spending targets.
Combine forecasts with budget alerts in AWS Budgets to receive proactive notifications when your spending is projected to exceed targets. This enables early intervention before costs spiral out of control.
For detailed tutorials on using Cost Explorer, check out our Ozy Solutions blog.
Cost Explorer API for Custom Analysis
For organizations that need cost data in their own systems — financial dashboards, BI tools, or custom applications — the Cost Explorer API provides programmatic access to all the same data available in the console.
Ozy Solutions’ AWS cost optimization services include custom cost reporting and analytics solutions that integrate Cost Explorer data into your existing business intelligence infrastructure.
Conclusion
AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool for understanding and managing your cloud spending. By mastering its features and building effective cost reporting practices, you can significantly improve your organization’s financial discipline around cloud usage. Ozy Solutions can help you set up Cost Explorer and build the reporting processes that keep your AWS costs under control.
