Amazon Cost Management FAQs

We have yet to meet a customer who does not consider cost management a priority. Amazon Cost Management tools are used by IT professionals, financial analysts, resource managers, and developers across all industries to access detailed information related to their costs and usage, analyze their cost drivers and usage trends, and take action on their insights.

The quickest way to get started with the Amazon Cost Management tools is to access the Billing Dashboard. From there, you can access a number of products that can help you better understand, analyze, and control your costs, including, but not limited to, Amazon Cost Explorer, Amazon Budgets, and the Amazon Cost & Usage Report.

Amazon Cost Explorer lets you explore your costs and usage at both a high level and at a detailed level of analysis, and empowering you to dive deeper using a number of filtering dimensions (e.g., Amazon Web Services Service, Region, Linked Account, etc.) Amazon Cost Explorer also gives you access to a set of default reports to help you get started, while also allowing you to create custom reports from scratch.

For more information about the breadth of Amazon Cost Explorer features, please refer to the Managing your Usage and Costs user guide.

Amazon Cost Explorer provides a set of default reports to help you get familiar with the available filtering dimensions and types analyses that can be done using Amazon Cost Explorer. These reports include a breakdown of your top 5 cost-accruing Amazon services, and an analysis of your overall Amazon EC2 usage, an analysis of the total costs of your linked accounts, and the Reserved Instance Utilization and Coverage reports.

To access these default reports, please access Cost Explorer.

For more information about the RI Utilization report and the RI Coverage reports, please reference the Reserved Instance Reporting FAQ section.

Yes. You can currently save up to 50 custom Amazon Cost Explorer reports.

The Amazon Cost Explorer API is the low-latency, ad-hoc query service that powers Amazon Cost Explorer, and is accessible via a command-line interface and supported Amazon SDKs. Using the Amazon Cost Explorer API, you can build custom, interactive cost management applications without having to set up and maintain any additional infrastructure.

The Amazon Cost Explorer API incurs a charge of CNY 0.07 per request. Please note that if your result set is paginated each page counts as a separate request.

To learn more about the Amazon Cost Explorer API, please reference the technical documentation.

The Amazon Cost & Usage Report is your one-stop shop for accessing the most detailed information available about your costs and usage. The Amazon Cost & Usage Report can be generated at an hourly and/or daily level of granularity.

For more information about the exact information available in the Amazon Cost & Usage Report, please reference the Cost & Usage Report Data Dictionary. You can enable the Amazon Cost & Usage Report from here.

You can enable the Amazon Cost & Usage Report from the Cost & Usage Reports page in the Billing Console. Please note that in order to receive the Amazon Cost & Usage Report, you will need to create and configure an S3 bucket.

The Amazon Cost & Usage Report is updated at least once per day. An updated version of the report is delivered to your S3 bucket each time an update is completed.

You can configure your Cost & Usage Reports to integrate with Amazon Athena. Once Amazon Athena integration has been enabled for your Cost & Usage Report, your data will be delivered in compressed Apache Parquet files to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice. From there, you can use an out-of-the-box Amazon CloudFormation template to perform a one-time configuration of an Amazon Glue crawler. This will ensure that your latest cost and usage information is always available to Amazon Athena – with no additional work required to prepare your data for analysis.

The Amazon Cost & Usage Report can also be automatically uploaded into Amazon Redshift. In order for this to work, ensure that you select the option for receiving an Amazon Redshift manifest file when setting your report preferences.

You can access Amazon ECS task cost and usage data in Amazon Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) by opting into Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS in your Amazon Cost Management console and CUR reporting preference page in the Billing console.  Split Cost Allocation Data enables cost visibility for all Amazon ECS container objects across your entire consolidated billing family (payer and linked accounts). Once activated, Split Cost Allocation Data automatically scans for tasks and ingests the telemetry usage data for your container workloads, and prepares the granular cost data for the current month. 

Customers find it challenging to allocate the cost of running their multi-tenant Amazon ECS clusters with shared workloads to individual applications, business units, or teams. With Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS and Amazon Batch, customers can allocate the cost of their EC2 instances to their containerized workloads running on these instances. Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS will generate container-level costs by analyzing each container’s Amazon EC2 instance resource consumption based on the price of the instance and the percentage of CPU and memory resources consumed by the containers running on the instance. Amazon Batch customers running workloads using Amazon ECS or Amazon Fargate compute environments will also see their cost and usage in the CUR. When customers tag their Amazon ECS resources or Amazon Batch resources, Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS and Amazon Batch will ingest your managed tags and user-added tags for these container-level resources. Customers can use these tags to create new or update existing business unit or teams using Amazon Cost Categories. Customers will have access to this granular, container-level cost and usage data for their business units or teams in CUR. 

Only regular and payer accounts have access to Cost Management preferences and can opt into Split Cost Allocation Data. Once opted in, member accounts can view the data in the Amazon Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). It can take up to 24 hours for the data to be visible in the CUR. 

Get started by opting in Split Cost Allocation Data.

There are three main ways to gain insight into the costs and usage associated with your RIs: the default RI reports in Cost Explorer, the reservation-related data in the Cost & Usage Report, and Amazon Cost Explorer's RI purchase recommendations.

Amazon Cost Explorer provides two reports out-of-the-box--the RI Utilization and RI Coverage reports--to help you understand how you are using your RIs. The RI Utilization report visualizes the degree to which you are using your existing resources and helps you identify opportunities to improve your RI cost efficiencies. The RI Coverage report allows you to discover how much of your overall instance usage is covered by RIs, so that you can make informed decisions about when to purchase or modify an RI to ensure maximum coverage.

The Cost & Usage Report gives you access to a wealth of RI-related information, including the ARN of the Reserved Instance that received the RI discount, the total reserved units in a reservation, and pricing information. This can help you trace your RI discounts, understand how well you are using your RIs, and analyze your savings compared to the On-Demand instance usage prices.

You can learn more about the Cost & Usage Report here. You can enable the Cost & Usage Report here.

Using Amazon Budgets, you can set a budget that alerts you when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted cost or usage amount. You can also set alerts based on your RI Utilization and Coverage using Amazon Budgets.

Learn more about Amazon Budgets here, or reference the Monitoring your Usage and Costs user guide.

Amazon Budgets gives you access to a number of filtering dimensions (i.e., Amazon Web Services Service, Availability Zone, and Linked Account), and allows you to create budgets that are tracked on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly cadence. Learn more about filters here. 

You can create up to 20,000 budgets. If you would like to increase your limit, please reach out to Customer Support.

For each budget, you are allowed to create up to five alerts. Each alert can be sent to 10 email subscribers and/or be published to an SNS topic.

Budgets without actions are free. You can create 2 actions-enabled budgets for free. Any additional active budgets accrue a cost that can be reviewed here.