AWS Cost Explorer

Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time

Product description

AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. Analyze your data at a high level (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts), or dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

Benefits

Preconfigured views

Get costs and usage information, and business insights with preconfigured views.

Filtering and grouping

Deep dive into your costs and usage data with filtering and grouping.

Cost and usage forecast

Create a cost and usage forecast for a future time range for your report.

Create custom reports

Create, save, and share custom reports to explore different sets of data.

How it works

You can enable Cost Explorer for your account using this procedure on the Billing and Cost Management console. You can't enable Cost Explorer using the API. After you enable Cost Explorer, AWS prepares the data about your costs for the current month and the last 12 months, and then calculates the forecast for the next 12 months. The current month's data is available for viewing in about 24 hours. The rest of your data takes a few days longer. Cost Explorer updates your cost data at least once every 24 hours.

Use cases

Build custom applications

Take advantage of direct access to the interactive, ad-hoc analytics engine that powers AWS Cost Explorer. The Cost Explorer API allows you to programmatically query your cost and usage data.

Use granular filtering

Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage with daily or monthly granularity. You can also access your data with further granularity by enabling hourly and resource level granularity.

Forecast your costs

Create a forecast by selecting a future time range for your report. You can use a forecast to estimate your AWS bill and set alarms and budgets based on predictions.

Understand cost and usage pattern

Identify patterns via day-over-day, month-over-month, or year-over-year cost and usage analysis. Leverage graphs and tables to view AWS cost and usage against a timeline to identify variance.

Analyze cost data using natural language

Understand and analyze your AWS costs using natural language in Amazon Q Developer. Ask questions like "Which region had the largest cost increase last month?" or "What were my highest-cost services last quarter?" and receive easy-to-understand, conversational responses.