Learning about AWS billing and cost management tools
In this section, we'll look at several AWS billing and cost management tools, enabling you to visualize your usage and spend across your AWS accounts as well as implementing better cost control strategies. We'll start by looking at the Cost Explorer service.
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer enables you to monitor and visualize your costs via dashboards and reports. You can access 12 months of usage and spending data as well as forecasting what your future costs will be for the next 12 months. You need to enable the Cost Explorer service and, once enabled, the current month's reporting data is accessible after 24 hours. Additional data from previous months will start to appear after a few more days.
The AWS Cost Explorer home page displays a snapshot of your spending. Here, you will find Current month costs as well as Forecasted month end costs, as per the following screenshot: