Billing and Cost Management

All things considered, the health of your organization’s finances and operations can depend a great deal on the ins and outs of your AWS account. So, besides the performance of your infrastructure resources like EC2 instances, you’ll want to keep a close watch on the account itself. The various tools found in your Billing Dashboard can help with this account oversight. The Dashboard itself, as you saw earlier, is accessible through the account drop-down menu at the top of the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Billing Dashboard

The main Billing & Cost Management Dashboard contains a helpful visual Spend Summary that displays your costs from the previous and current months so far, along with a forecast of the costs you’ll likely face through the end of the month. There’s also a Month-to-Date Spend By Service display from which choosing the Bill Details button will take you to an itemized breakdown of your current spending.

The...