Cost Explorer
As you recall from Chapter 2, “Understanding Your AWS Account,” AWS Cost Explorer is a feature of AWS Billing and Cost Management that offers configurable reports and graphs to help you understand how each of your AWS services impacts your monthly bill.
AWS Cost Explorer offers the following three categories of reports:
- Cost and usage reports
- Reservation reports
- Reserved instance recommendations
Cost and Usage
You can generate cost and usage reports to give you a graphical view of your daily and monthly costs and usage over time. Cost Explorer can also show you the forecast for the current month, 3 months out, and 12 months out, helping you plan ahead. Figure 6.18 shows the monthly costs for the last 12 months and a forecast for the current month.
FIGURE 6.18 Cost and usage report showing monthly costs
You can go back as far as one year and filter or group by several parameters including but not limited to the following:
- Service
- Availability Zone...
