AWS Cost and Usage Reports: Comprehensive and customizable reporting on your AWS costs and cost drivers

Posted on: Dec 16, 2015

Today we launched AWS Cost and Usage Reports. These new reports provide a number of features that allow you to better understand and manage your costs.

AWS Cost and Usage Reports provide comprehensive data about your costs, including those related to product, pricing, and usage. This allows you to more thoroughly understand individual costs and to analyze them in greater detail. To illustrate, you can now easily view EC2 costs and usage by instance type and drill down into product-specific details such as operating system, processor, and tenancy and pricing details such as rate and purchase option (On-Demand, Spot, or Reserved).

These new reports are also customizable, allowing you to select the data included in your report (e.g., resource IDs), aggregate and display those data at the time level of your choice (hourly or daily), and deliver the report to a specific S3 bucket. This customization provides you the data that are relevant to you in the location of your choice.

AWS Cost and Usage Reports also feature a normalized data model in which each discrete cost component (e.g., instance type) is presented in an exclusive column. This data model makes it simple to analyze and comprehend your report data without additional parsing or time-consuming investigation.

In addition, these reports are highly accessible. We have provided an easy-to-use interface, which makes report creation simple. We have also reduced the report size to improve accessibility by automatically separating the reports into multiple files (a manifest file to simplify report concatenation is included) and reducing the size of those files using compression (gzip or ZIP). Together, these features make it simple for you to share your reports and load them into many analytics tools.

Concerning analytics tools, the gzip-compression option enables you to easily upload your reports to Amazon Redshift and run queries against them using a variety of business intelligence and data visualization applications such as Amazon QuickSight. For more information about uploading your report data to Amazon Redshift, see Uploading an AWS Cost and Usage Report to Amazon Redshift.

To get started, navigate to the Reports page under the Billing and Cost Management console. To learn more about this new product and how to use it to better understand and manage your AWS costs, see Understanding Your Usage with Billing Reports in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.