Introducing the AWS Cost Explorer API

Posted on: Nov 20, 2017

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. This is done via an intuitive interface that enables you to quickly create custom reports (including charts and tabular data) and analyses of your cost and usage data, both at a high level and for highly-specific requests. Starting today, you can directly access the Cost Explorer API, the low-latency ad-hoc query service that powers the Cost Explorer web application. 

The Cost Explorer API gives you programmatic access to the full Cost Explorer dataset, including advanced metrics (e.g., Reserved Instance utilization) and your cost allocation tags. To start, you can leverage the Cost Explorer API to break down your costs by grouping your data up to two levels. For example, you can return all of your Amazon EC2 Running Hours cost and usage data segmented by Instance Type and your “project” tag. Further, you can query for highly-specific data, such as all costs associated with Amazon EC2 Running Hours in the m4 instance family that are not tagged as “project: secretProject.” With the Cost Explorer API, you can now build interactive, performant cost management applications that suit your organization’s needs without having to set up or maintain any analytics infrastructure. 

To get started using the Cost Explorer API, please access the Using the Cost Explorer API or refer to the Cost Explorer webpage