Category: AWS Cost Explorer

Given cloud invoice timing and the corporate closing calendar, variances between the AWS CUR and the GL are common for many companies. Our recommendation is to document your financial closing process, and educate leadership on any identified variance drivers. Calculating the variance percentage between the finalized AWS CUR and your GL entry to use as a talking point can also enhance understanding of the financial process.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to catch up with all the re:Invent launch announcements from the AWS Cloud Financial Management team, let me walk you through how your FinOps experience may be improved for better with the latest capabilities that were just released last week at AWS re:Invent 2023. I’ve also included recordings of these launch announcements, so you can watch these at your own pace.

We have extended the history and improved the granularity of data available in AWS Cost Explorer. Cost Explorer by default now supports 14 months of cost and usage data at daily granularity. In addition, customers have the option to enable up to 38 months of history at a monthly granularity, and they have the option to enable 14 days of resource level data for any AWS service at daily granularity. Each of these features is offered for free.

Today, AWS launched a unified Billing and Cost Management console to help you manage your AWS cloud finances more easily and efficiently. The unified console includes a new home page with insights and recommendations to help you make faster, better-informed decisions, more intuitive navigation to streamline your workflows, and improved resources to help you learn and implement Cloud Financial Management best practices. This post explains how you can use the unified Billing and Cost Management console to manage your AWS cloud finances and answers frequently asked questions.

Thanks to our product and engineering teams’ tireless efforts in building new capabilities for AWS Cloud Financial Management portfolio, I get to talk about these amazing features. Let’s take a look at what we’ve made available for you in the last quarter.

If you’re planning to attend the AWS re:Invent 2023 and wondering what Cloud Financial Management sessions and activities you should participate, look no further! In this blog post, we’ll take a sneak peek into these programs. Hope it can help you navigate re:Invent like a true CFM pro and learn and meet with like-minded FinOps professionals.

To provide the ability for end users of our resellers and large organizations to understand and analyze cost at their negotiated rates, we enabled proforma cost support in Cost Explorer.

Cost transparencies and insights will help drive data-driven and informed decisions. This blog describes a flywheel approach that an enterprise can utilize to optimize their AWS spend and leverage those saving towards driving continuous innovation.

In case you missed the launch announcement from AWS Cloud Financial Management solution category in Q2, this blog presents you a quick summary.

Starting today, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection will be automatically enabled for all new AWS Cost Explorer customers by default to help save time and increase cost control. This means that if you own a standalone account or management account and enable AWS Cost Explorer, on or after March 27, 2023, you will automatically have a default configuration of AWS Cost Anomaly Detection that monitors your spend by AWS service and emails you a daily summary when a cost anomaly above a certain threshold is detected.