Posted On: Dec 12, 2016
Tags can be used to categorize and track your AWS costs, but depend upon you being diligent about applying tags to your resources and making sure that they are enabled for cost allocation. To reduce this overhead, we are introducing an option to automatically mark your resources with the new Resource Created By tag. This tag includes information related to the resource creator depending on the authentication mechanism used, such as Account ID and IAM role. Even though the Resource Created By tag is specific to the Billing & Cost Management console, it functions exactly like the user-defined cost allocation tags within the Detailed Billing Report, Cost & Usage Report, Cost Explorer, and Budgets products.
In addition to the new Resource Created By tag feature, we now provide payer accounts the ability to refresh their user-defined tags on demand from the Cost Allocation Tags dashboard. This enables payer accounts to more quickly update and view the user defined tags created by their linked accounts. We also send an email notification when the tags have been refreshed on the Cost Allocation Tags dashboard so that payer accounts can activate them for cost allocation.
Starting today, payer accounts can access these features from their Cost Allocation Tags dashboard within the Billing & Cost Management console. To learn more about cost allocation tags, please refer to Using Cost Allocation Tags.
Cost allocation tags have also been fully integrated into the Billing reports and tools. For example, you can gain greater visibility into your costs when you filter or group-by tags in Cost Explorer. Furthermore, you can use a newly added display option in Cost Explorer to view costs associated with untagged resources. This new feature provides an easy way for you to audit resources that were not tagged, and therefore opaque to cost analysis. You can apply additional filters to drill down to a specific account or service for further analysis.
To get started, navigate to your Cost Explorer in your Billing & Cost Management console. To learn more about cost explorer, please refer to the Cost Explorer User Guide.