Cost Monitoring and Budgets on AWS

Published in

AVM Consulting Blog

5 min readJun 11, 2023

The AWS Cost Management console has features that you can use for budgeting and forecasting costs and methods for you to optimize your pricing to reduce your overall AWS bill. The AWS Cost Management console is integrated closely with the Billing console.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to view and analyze your costs and usage. You can explore your usage and costs using the main graph, the Cost Explorer cost and usage reports, or the Cost Explorer RI reports.

AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. 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.

AWS Cost Explorer Features

Get started quickly

A set of default reports are included to help you quickly gain insight into your cost drivers and usage trends.

Forecast future costs and usage

Use forecasting to get a better idea of what your costs and usage may look like in the future so that you can plan ahead.

Set time interval and granularity

Set a custom time period, and determine whether you would like to view your data at a monthly or daily level of granularity.

Save your progress

Once you arrive at a helpful view, save your progress as a new report that you can refer back to in the future.

Filter/Group your data

Dig deeper into your data by taking advantage of filtering and grouping functionality, using a variety of available dimensions.

Build custom applications

Directly access the interactive, ad-hoc analytics engine that powers AWS Cost Explorer.

Getting Started

AWS Cost Explorer provides you with a set of default reports that you can use as the starting place for your analysis. From there, use the filtering and grouping capabilities to dive deeper into your cost and usage data and generate custom insights.

Monthly Costs by AWS Service

AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report that helps you visualize the costs and usage associated with your top five cost-accruing AWS services, and gives you a detailed breakdown on all services in the table view.

The reports let you adjust the time range to view historical data going back up to twelve months to gain an understanding of your cost trends.

Hourly and Resource Level Granularity

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over a daily or monthly granularity. The solution also lets you dive deeper using granular filtering and grouping dimensions such as Usage Type and Tags. You can also access your data with further granularity by enabling hourly and resource level granularity.

Savings Plans

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% on your AWS compute usage. This pricing model offers lower prices on Amazon EC2 instances usage, regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy or AWS Region, and also applies to AWS Fargate usage.

AWS Cost Explorer will help you to choose a Savings Plan, and will guide you through the purchase process.

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.

You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. Reservation alerts are supported for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations.

AWS Budgets Features

Create and manage budgets

Set custom cost and usage budgets to more easily manage your AWS spend. Monitor your budget status from the AWS Budgets dashboard or AWS Budgets reports.

Refine your budget using filters

Track your cost or usage across multiple dimensions by adding filters related to Service, Linked Account(s), Region, Tag, and more.

Add notifications to your budget

Set up to five alert thresholds for each budget. Each alert can notify up to ten email recipients as well as publish updates to a Slack channel, Amazon Chime room, or Amazon SNS topic of your choice.

Getting Started

AWS Budgets Dashboard

The AWS Budgets Dashboard is your hub for creating, tracking, and inspecting your budgets. From the AWS Budgets Dashboard, you can create, edit, and manage your budgets, as well as view the status of each of your budgets. You can also view additional details about your budgets, such as a high-level variance analysis and a budget criteria summary.

Budgets can be created at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly level, and you can customize the start and end dates. You can further refine your budget to track costs associated with multiple dimensions, such as AWS service, linked account, tag, and others. Budget alerts can be sent via email and/or Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic.