Posted On: Mar 23, 2021
Starting today, you can use inherited and default values with
AWS Cost Categories. AWS Cost Categories enables you to define rules to categorize your costs using dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. With the new features, you can achieve more efficient and holistic categorization of your cost and usage information.
Inherited value is a new rule type that allows a Cost Category to dynamically inherit its values from the values of a selected dimension. You can choose either tags or accounts as the dimension from which to inherit values from. For example, if you want to dynamically group costs based on the value of a specific tag key, you can choose the inherited value rule type with tag as the dimension, and specify the tag key to use. Consider you use a tag key, teams, to tag your resources with tag values as alpha, beta, and gamma; with the inherited value rule, you can set up a Cost Category that dynamically derives its values as alpha, beta, and gamma from your teams tag key. Hence, you can conveniently leverage your tags to create Cost Category values instead of individually mapping each tag value to a corresponding Cost Category value. Similarly, you can also use accounts as a dimension to dynamically create Cost Category values from your account names.
Cost Categories matches your costs to an appropriate Cost Category value based on your defined rules. Previously, the costs that were not matched by any rule would not be assigned a Cost Category value. Such uncategorized costs showed up on AWS cost management products, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, with a “No Cost Category” label and on your AWS Cost & Usage Report with an empty Cost Category value. Now, with the default value feature, you can assign a contextually meaningful name to uncategorized costs. For example, for your Cost Categories teams with values as alpha, beta, and gamma, you can define the default value as other teams and reference it on all cost management products.