Posted On: Nov 13, 2019

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over a daily or monthly granularity. The solution also lets you dive deeper using granular billing dimensions such as usage type and tags. Starting today, you can access your data with further granularity by enabling hourly and resource level granularity.

By enabling hourly granularity you can view your hourly costs up to the past 14 days to track costs during nights or off peak hours. Resource granularity gives you access to EC2-Instances, which you can use to identify the specific resource incurring costs. Using Cost Explorer’s time selection, filtering, and grouping capabilities, you are now able to hone-in on the cost and usage of your workloads.

To get started, go to the Cost Explorer settings page as the payer account to opt-in to hourly or resource level granularity. The cost is $0.01 per 1,000 UsageRecords month. A UsageRecords is defined as one-line of usage. For example, one EC2 instance running for 24 hours will generate 24 distinct usage records at the hourly granularity.

To learn more about AWS Cost Explorer capabilities, refer to the AWS Cost Explorer webpage and to get started with AWS Cost Explorer, please refer to this blog post.