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 cost and usage over time. Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. You can also ask questions in your own words and receive detailed insights from Amazon Q Developer while Cost Explorer automatically updates its charts, tables, and report parameters to reflect the analysis. 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.
Natural language cost analysis
Ask questions about your costs using the suggested prompts or in your own words, by clicking the Ask question button. Get detailed insights in Amazon Q Developer alongside automatically updated Cost Explorer visualizations, filters, and groupings.
Intelligent cost explanations
Click 'Analyze with Amazon Q' on any cost report to instantly receive comprehensive explanations covering your cost trends, top drivers, anomalies, and guidance to optimization opportunities through follow-up questions. Works across historical, forecast, and compare views.
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.
Understand your costs with intelligent explanations
Configure any cost report with your preferred filters and time period, then click 'Analyze with Amazon Q' to receive explanations for your costs. Amazon Q identifies what drove your spending changes, surfaces anomalies that need attention, and guides you to optimization opportunities through follow-up conversation. Whether you're reviewing historical costs, understanding your forecast, or comparing months, the analysis adapts to your view.
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 projections. Click 'Analyze with Amazon Q' button to receive detailed forecast explanations covering projected spending trajectories, the services expected to drive future costs, and the factors influencing your projections.
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 your cost and usage data using natural language
Ask questions about your AWS cost and usage in Cost Explorer using suggested prompts or your own words. Click a suggested prompt like "Show me my top spending services this month" for instant cost insights and visualizations, or use the Ask Question button to type questions like "What were my highest-cost services last quarter?" Powered by Amazon Q Developer, both experiences deliver easy-to- understand insights and conversational responses in Amazon Q and updated visualizations in Cost Explorer or Amazon Q artifact panel.
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