Announcing the New AWS Cost Explorer Console

Posted on: Nov 15, 2018

Today we are announcing the general availability of the new AWS Cost Explorer console. With brand new summary dashboards, automated identification of spend and usage trends, and a simplified user experience, the new Cost Explorer console is designed to help customers of all sizes, and levels of expertise, perform cost management activities.

The new AWS Cost Explorer console now surfaces the most important cost- and usage-related information at a summary level, while continuing to provide the ability to analyze your data at a granular level. Upon entering Cost Explorer, you will now be able to access information regarding your month-to-date spend, your forecasted monthly spend, as well as a chart visualizing your historical daily spend patterns. From there, you can easily navigate to “Explore” and begin applying filters and groupings to your data (e.g., visualize the costs and usage associated with your m4 instance family with the application:SecretProject tag applied). If you are uncertain of the data you wish to explore, Cost Explorer now automatically analyzes your usage patterns and surfaces these trends to you via the monthly trends functionality located on the Cost Explorer home page. These automated trends can help you identify significant cost drivers that previously might have gone unnoticed and take action accordingly.

The new Cost Explorer console is also designed to help you manage your Amazon EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and ElasticSearch reservations at scale. The new Reservations Summary dashboard helps you access an overview of your reservations and your estimated month-to-date savings, as well as surface reservation opportunities for additional savings. From this page, you can easily navigate to the RI Utilization and Coverage reports to manage your existing reservation inventory and dive deeper into your reservation-related savings, or navigate to your RI purchase recommendations to identify and take action on optimization opportunities.

To learn more about Cost Explorer, you can log into AWS and start with the interactive user tutorial. You can also visit the AWS Cost Explorer webpage or refer to the Analyzing your costs using Cost Explorer technical documentation.