AWS Cost Categories now supports hierarchies and status tracking
Starting today, you can create multilevel hierarchies with AWS Cost Categories to group your cost and usage information based on your business needs. Cost Category is added as a new dimension, in addition to Tag, Account, Service, and Charge Type. Furthermore, you can now track whether your most recent cost category updates have been applied to your cost and usage data via a new “status” attribute on your Cost Categories dashboard.
AWS Cost Categories allows you to categorize your cost and usage information precisely to your organizational structure and cost allocation needs such as teams, cost centers, geography, applications, and more. Using Cost Categories, you can create these unique categories and then write rules on which costs belong to each group. After defining your unique category, you can view, track, and optimize costs using Cost Categories in the AWS Cost Management suite of products such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Report.
Previously, you could categorize your cost and usage data using four dimensions – Account, Tag, Service, and Charge type. Starting today, you can also choose Cost Category as a dimension to create hierarchical relationships among your cost categories. For example, consider you have defined a “Team” cost category with values as “Team-1”, “Team-2”, and “Team-3” to categorize your cost and usage per team based on your accounts and tags as dimensions. You may want to further categorize your teams into separate business units for your cost management needs. You can easily do so by creating a new “Business unit” cost category that is built on top of your existing “Team” cost category by selecting dimension as Cost Category and “Team” as the Cost Category name for the dimension. You can then select “Team-1” and “Team-2” as dimension values for “BU-1” and “Team-3” as dimension value for “BU-2”.
To learn more about AWS Cost Categories visit Cost Categories page, Cost Categories user guide, and the getting started blog post.