Author: Fredrik Tunvall

As organizations scale cloud usage, understanding cost variations becomes increasingly complex. Many of you have told us that you sometimes had to spend hours analyzing why costs changed from one month to another. To address this, we’re excited to announce a new cost comparison feature in AWS Cost Explorer that provides automated month-over-month cost change analysis. This feature enables you to quickly identify, understand, and explain variations in your AWS spending. With this new feature, you can now pinpoint the largest cost changes across any cost dimension, such as services, accounts and regions, and drill down into detailed explanations of these changes, including shifts in usage patterns, changes in commitment-based discounts, and applied credits within seconds.

AWS announced new capabilities in AWS Budgets that provides greater flexibility in how you track and manage your AWS spend. These enhancements include support for additional cost metrics (net unblended costs and net amortized costs), an ability to exclude specific dimension values when creating budgets (such as services, accounts, and instance types), new filtering capabilities for charge types for fine-grained control to include or exclude AWS Savings Plans (SPs) or Reservation (RI) upfront charges, recurring fees, taxes, and credits, and enhanced API functionality that supports filter expressions that are consistent with AWS Cost Explorer.

Today, AWS enhanced Cost Anomaly Detection with the ability to provide multiple root causes for cost anomalies. This new capability empowers FinOps professionals and cloud financial managers to quickly identify and resolve the underlying factors driving unexpected cost increases. For FinOps teams striving to optimize cloud spend and maintain financial accountability, this enhancement offers deeper insights and faster resolution times. This post explains how this improvement can help you resolve anomalies more efficiently and answers some frequently asked questions.