AWS Cost Management

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AWS Cost Management

User Guide

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AWS Cost Management: User Guide

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What is AWS Cost Management?

Welcome to the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

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. Using both together, you can manage your costs in a holistic manner. You can use Billing console resources to manage your ongoing payments, and AWS Cost Management console resources to optimize your future costs. For information about AWS resources to understand, pay, or organize your AWS bills, see the AWS Billing User Guide.

With the AWS Cost Management console and the Billing console, you can do the following tasks.

Use cases Description AWS Cost Management

feature names Billing console feature names

Organize Construct your

cost allocation and governance foundation with your own tagging strategy.

- AWS Cost Categories

AWS Cost Allocation Tags

Report Raise awareness and

accountability of your cloud spend with the detailed, allocable cost data.

AWS Cost

Explorer (p. 7) AWS Cost and Usage Reports

Access Track billing

information across the organization in a consolidated view.

- AWS Consolidated

Billing

AWS Purchase Order Management AWS Credits

Control Establish eﬀective

governance

mechanisms with the right guardrails in place.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (p. 62) -

Forecast Estimate your resource

utilization and spend with forecast dashboards that you create.

AWS Cost Explorer (p. 7) AWS Budgets (p. 36)

-

Budget Keep your spend in

check with custom budget threshold and auto alert notiﬁcation.

AWS Budgets (p. 36) AWS Budgets Actions (p. 51)

-

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Features of AWS Cost Management

Use cases Description AWS Cost Management

feature names Billing console feature names

Purchase Use free trials and

programmatic discounts based on your workload pattern and needs.

Savings Plans AWS Reserved Instances (p. 78)

AWS Free Tier

Rightsize Align your service allocation size to your actual workload demand.

Rightsizing

Recommendations (p. 78)-

Inspect Stay up to date

with your resource deployment and cost optimization opportunities.

AWS Cost

Explorer (p. 7) -

Features of AWS Cost Management

AWS Cost Explorer

Use case: Report, Forecast, Inspect

AWS Cost Explorer is a feature that you can use to visualize your cost data for further analysis. Using it, you can filter graphs by several different values. This includes Availability Zone, AWS service, and AWS Region, It also includes other specifics such as custom cost allocation tag, Amazon EC2 instance type, and purchase option. If you use consolidated billing, you can also filter by member account. In addition, you can see a forecast of future costs based on your historical cost data.

Documentation: Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer (p. 7) AWS Budgets

Use case: Forecast, Inspect

AWS Budgets tracks your AWS usage and costs. AWS Budgets uses the cost visualization that's provided by AWS Cost Explorer to show the status of your budgets. This provides forecasts of your estimated costs and tracks your AWS usage, including your AWS Free Tier usage. You can also use AWS Budgets to create Amazon Simple Notiﬁcation Service (Amazon SNS) notiﬁcations for when you exceed your budgeted amounts, or when your estimated costs exceed your budgets.

Documentation: Managing your costs with AWS Budgets (p. 36) AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

Use case: Control

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a feature that uses machine learning to continuously monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spends. You can receive alerts individually in aggregated reports, and receive alerts in an email or an Amazon SNS topic. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is beneﬁcial to analyze and determine the root cause of the anomaly, and identify the factor that is driving the cost increase.

Documentation: Detecting unusual spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (p. 62) Rightsizing Recommendations

Use case: Control

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Features of AWS Cost Management

Rightsizing recommendations is a feature that reviews your historical Amazon EC2 usage for the past 14 days to identify opportunities for greater cost and usage eﬃciency. The feature identiﬁes cost saving opportunities by downsizing or terminating instances in Amazon EC2.

Documentation: Accessing Reserved Instance Recommendations (p. 78) Savings Plans

Use case: Purchase

Savings Plans offers a flexible pricing model that provides savings on AWS usage. Savings Plans provide savings beyond On-Demand rates in exchange for a commitment of using a specified amount of compute power (measured every hour) for a one or three year period. You can manage your plans by using recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts in AWS Cost Explorer.

Documentation: What is Savings Plans

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Step 1: Sign up for AWS

Getting started

This section provides information that you need to get started with using the AWS Cost Management console.

Topics

• Step 1: Sign up for AWS (p. 4)

• Step 2: Attach the required IAM policy to an IAM identity (p. 4)

• Step 3: Review your bills and usage (p. 4)

• Step 4: Set up your AWS Cost Management features (p. 5)

• What do I do next? (p. 5)

Step 1: Sign up for AWS

If you're new to AWS, create an AWS account. For more information, see Getting Started with AWS.

Step 2: Attach the required IAM policy to an IAM identity

AWS account owners can delegate access to speciﬁc IAM users who need to view or manage the Billing and Cost Management data for an AWS account. To start activating access to the Billing and Cost Management console, see IAM tutorial: Delegate access to the billing console in the IAM User Guide.

For more information about IAM policies speciﬁc to Billing and Cost Management, see Using identity- based policies (IAM policies) for Billing and Cost Management.

For a list of Billing and Cost Management policy examples, see Billing and Cost Management policy examples.

Step 3: Review your bills and usage

Use features in the Billing console to view your current AWS charges and AWS usage.

To open the Billing console and view your usage and charges

1. Sign into the AWS Management Console and open the Billing and Cost Management at https://

console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.

2. Choose Bills to see the details for your current charges.

Choose Payments to see your historical payment transactions.

Choose AWS Cost and Usage Reports to see reports that break down your costs.

For information about Billing console features, see the Billing User Guide.

For more information about setting up and using AWS Cost and Usage Reports, see the AWS Cost and Usage Reports User Guide.

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Step 4: Set up your AWS Cost Management features

Review the process that's needed to activate your AWS Cost Management features.

• AWS Cost Explorer: Enabling Cost Explorer (p. 7)

• AWS Budgets: Best practices for AWS Budgets (p. 37)

• AWS Budgets reports: Reporting your budget metrics with budget reports (p. 59)

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Setting up your anomaly detection (p. 62)

• Savings Plans: Getting started with Savings Plans in the Savings Plans User Guide

What do I do next?

Now that you have AWS Cost Management set up, you're ready to use the features available to you. The rest of this guide helps you navigate your journey using the console.

Using the Billing and Cost Management API

Use the AWS Billing and Cost Management API Reference to programmatically use some AWS Cost Management features.

Learn more

You can ﬁnd more information about AWS Cost Management features including presentations, virtual workshops, and blog posts on the Cloud Financial Management with AWS page.

You can ﬁnd virtual workshops by choosing the Services drop-down and selecting your feature.

Getting help

There are several resources that you can use if you want to learn more about or need help with any of the AWS Cost Management features.

AWS Knowledge Center

All AWS account owners have access to account and billing support free of charge. You can ﬁnd answers to your questions quickly by visiting the AWS Knowledge Center.

To ﬁnd your question or request

1. Open AWS Knowledge Center.

2. Choose Billing Management.

3. Scan the list of topics to locate a question that is similar to yours.

Contacting AWS Support

Contacting AWS Support is the fastest and most direct method for communicating with an AWS associate about your questions. AWS Support doesn't publish a direct phone number for reaching a

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Getting help

support representative. You can use the following process to have an associate reach out to you by email or phone instead.

Only personalized technical support requires a support plan. For more information, visit AWS Support.

To open an AWS Support case where you specify Regarding: Account and Billing Support, you must either be signed into AWS as the root account owner, or have IAM permissions to open a support case. For more information, see Accessing AWS Support in the AWS Support User Guide.

If you closed your AWS account, you can still sign in to AWS Support and view past bills.

To contact AWS Support

1. Sign in and navigate to the AWS Support Center. If prompted, enter the email address and password for your account.

2. Choose Create case.

3. On the Create case page, choose Account and billing support and ﬁll in the required ﬁelds on the form.

4. After you complete the form, under Contact options, choose either Web for an email response or Phone to request a telephone call from an AWS Support representative. Instant messaging support isn't available for billing inquiries.

To contact AWS Support when you can't sign in to AWS

1. Recover your password or submit a form at AWS account support.

2. Choose an inquiry type in the Request information section.

3. Fill out the How can we help you? section.

4. Choose Submit.

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Enabling Cost Explorer

Analyzing your costs with 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. You can view data for up to the last 12 months, forecast how much you're likely to spend for the next 12 months, and get recommendations for what Reserved Instances to purchase.

You can use Cost Explorer to identify areas that need further inquiry and see trends that you can use to understand your costs.

You can view your costs and usage using the Cost Explorer user interface free of charge. You can also access your data programmatically using the Cost Explorer API. Each paginated API request incurs a charge of $0.01. You can't disable Cost Explorer after you enable it.

In addition, Cost Explorer provides preconﬁgured views that display at-a-glance information about your cost trends and give you a head start on customizing views that suit your needs.

When you ﬁrst sign up for Cost Explorer, AWS prepares the data about your costs for the current month and the last 12 months, and then calculates the forecast for the next 12 months. The current month's data is available for viewing in about 24 hours. The rest of your data takes a few days longer. Cost Explorer refreshes your cost data at least once every 24 hours. However, this depends on your upstream data from your billing applications, and some data might be updated later than 24 hours. After you sign up, Cost Explorer can display up to 12 months of historical data (if you have that much), the current month, and the forecasted costs for the next 12 months. The ﬁrst time that you use Cost Explorer, Cost Explorer walks you through the main parts of the console with an explanation for each section.

Cost Explorer uses the same dataset that is used to generate the AWS Cost and Usage Reports and the detailed billing reports. For a comprehensive review of the data, you can download it into a comma- separated value (CSV) ﬁle.

Topics

• Enabling Cost Explorer (p. 7)

• Getting started with Cost Explorer (p. 10)

• Exploring your data using Cost Explorer (p. 10)

• Using the AWS Cost Explorer API (p. 26)

Enabling Cost Explorer

You can enable Cost Explorer for your account using this procedure on the Billing and Cost Management console. You can't enable Cost Explorer using the API. After you enable Cost Explorer, AWS prepares the data about your costs for the current month and the last 12 months, and then calculates the forecast for the next 12 months. The current month's data is available for viewing in about 24 hours. The rest of your data takes a few days longer. Cost Explorer updates your cost data at least once every 24 hours.

By default, you can launch Cost Explorer if your account is a member account in an organization. The management account can, however, block your access. For more information, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations.

Note

An account’s status with an organization aﬀects what cost and usage data is visible:

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Controlling access for Cost Explorer

• When a standalone account joins an organization, the account no longer has access to cost and usage data from the time range when the account was a standalone account.

• If a member account leaves an organization and becomes a standalone account, the account no longer has access to cost and usage data from the time range when the account was a member of the organization. The account has access only to the data that is generated as a standalone account.

• If a member account leaves organization A to join organization B, the account no longer has access to cost and usage data from the time range when the account was a member of organization A. The account has access only to the data that is generated as a member of organization B.

• If an account rejoins an organization that it previously belonged to, the account regains access to its historical cost and usage data.

Signing up to receive the AWS Cost and Usage Reports or the Detailed Billing Report doesn't automatically enable Cost Explorer. You must still enable it by performing the following procedure.

To sign up for Cost Explorer

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Cost Management console at https://

console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home.

2. On the navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer.

3. On the Welcome to Cost Explorer page, choose Launch Cost Explorer.

For more information about controlling access to Cost Explorer, see Controlling access for Cost Explorer (p. 8).

Controlling access for Cost Explorer

You can manage access to your Cost Explorer in the following ways:

• The management account can enable Cost Explorer at a root level, automatically enabling all member accounts.

• After member accounts are enabled, the management account can use the Cost Explorer settings to control the level of information you want to expose in Cost Explorer. Levels of information can include cost, refunds or credits, discounts (for example, reservation volume discounts, bundled discounts), and Reserved Instance (RI) recommendations.

• After you enable Cost Explorer at the management account level, you can control the IAM policies of your IAM users to restrict access to Cost Explorer at the account level. Users either get all access or no access with this option.

This topic provides details about how to control access in Cost Explorer.

For information about managing access to Billing and Cost Management pages, see Overview of managing access permissions (p. 88).

To reference Cost Explorer IAM policies, see Using identity-based policies (IAM policies) for AWS Cost Management (p. 91).

For more information about consolidated billing, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations.

Topics

• Granting Cost Explorer access (p. 9)

• Controlling access using Cost Explorer preferences (p. 9)

• Cost Explorer and IAM users (p. 10)

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Controlling access for Cost Explorer

Granting Cost Explorer access

You can enable Cost Explorer access if you are signed into the management account with your root credentials through the Billing and Cost Management console. Enabling Cost Explorer at the management account level enables Cost Explorer for all of your organization accounts. All accounts in the organization are granted access, and you can't grant or deny access individually.

Controlling access using Cost Explorer preferences

A management account can grant access to Cost Explorer for all or none of the member accounts. Access isn’t customizable for each individual member account.

The management account in AWS Organizations has full access to all Billing and Cost Management information for costs incurred by both the management account and member accounts. Member accounts only have access to their own cost and usage data in Cost Explorer.

The owner of a management account can:

• View all costs in Cost Explorer.

• Grant all member accounts the permission to see the costs for their own member account, refunds, credits, and RI recommendations.

Member account owners can't see costs, refunds, and RI recommendations for other accounts in the Organizations. For more information about consolidated billing, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations.

If you're an AWS account owner and not using consolidated billing, you have full access to all Billing and Cost Management information including Cost Explorer.

Organizations account status use cases

An account’s status with an organization aﬀects what cost and usage data is visible in the following ways:

• If a standalone account joins an organization, the account loses access to cost and usage data from when the account was a standalone account.

• If a member account leaves an organization and becomes a standalone account, the account no longer has access to cost and usage data from when the account was a member of their previous organization. The account only has access to the data that is generated as a standalone account.

• If a member account leaves organization A to join organization B, the account no longer has access to cost and usage data from organization A. The account has access only to the data that is generated as a member of organization B.

• If an account rejoins an organization that it previously belonged to, the account regains access to its historical cost and usage data.

Controlling member accounts’ access using Cost Explorer preferences

You can grant or restrict the access to all member accounts in your Organizations. When you enable your account at the management account level, all member accounts are granted access to their cost and usage data by default.

To control member account access to Cost Explorer data

2. In the navigation pane, choose Preferences.

3. On the Preferences page, select or clear the Linked Account Access check box.

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Getting started with Cost Explorer

4. Choose Save.

Cost Explorer and IAM users

After you enable Cost Explorer at the management account level, you can use IAM to manage access to your billing data for individual IAM users. This enables you to grant or revoke access on an individual level for each account, rather than granting access to all member accounts.

An IAM user must be granted explicit permission to view pages in the Billing and Cost Management console. With the appropriate permissions, the IAM user can view costs for the AWS account that the IAM user belongs to. For the policy that grants the necessary permissions to an IAM user, see Overview of managing access permissions (p. 88).

Getting started with Cost Explorer

After you enable Cost Explorer, you can launch it from the Billing and Cost Management console.

Starting Cost Explorer

Start Cost Explorer by opening the Billing and Cost Management console and choosing Launch Cost Explorer.

To open Cost Explorer

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer.

3. On the Cost Explorer page, choose Launch Cost Explorer.

This opens the Cost dashboard that shows you the following:

• Your estimated costs for the month to date

• Your forecasted costs for the month

• A graph of your daily costs

• Your ﬁve top cost trends

• A list of reports that you recently viewed

Exploring your data using Cost Explorer

On the Cost Explorer dashboard, Cost Explorer shows your estimated costs for the month to date, your forecasted costs for the month, a graph of your daily costs, your ﬁve top cost trends, and a list of reports that you recently viewed.

All costs reﬂect your usage up to the previous day. For example, if today is December 2, the data includes your usage through December 1.

Note

In the current billing period, the data depends on your upstream data from your billing applications, and some data might be updated later than 24 hours.

• Your Cost Explorer costs (p. 11)

• Your Cost Explorer trends (p. 11)

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Navigating Cost Explorer

• Your daily unblended costs (p. 11)

• Your monthly unblended costs (p. 11)

• Your net unblended costs (p. 12)

• Your recent Cost Explorer reports (p. 12)

• Your amortized costs (p. 12)

Navigating Cost Explorer

You can use the icons in the left pane to do the following:

• Go to the main Cost Explorer dashboard

• See a list of the default Cost Explorer reports

• See a list of your saved reports

• See information about your reservations

• See your reservation recommendations

Your Cost Explorer costs

At the top of the Cost Explorer page are the Month-to-date costs and Forecasted month end costs.

The Month-to-date costs shows how much you're estimated to have incurred in charges so far this month and compares it to this time last month. The Forecasted month end costs shows how much Cost Explorer estimates that you will owe at the end of the month and compares your estimated costs to your actual costs of the previous month. The Month-to-date costs and the Forecasted month end costs don't include refunds.

The costs for Cost Explorer are only shown in US dollars.

Your Cost Explorer trends

In the this month trends section, Cost Explorer shows your top cost trends. For example, your costs related to a speciﬁc service have gone up, or your costs from a speciﬁc type of RI have gone up. To see all of your costs trends, choose View all trends in the upper-right corner of the trend section.

To understand a trend in more depth, choose it. You're taken to a Cost Explorer chart that shows the costs that went into calculating that trend.

Your daily unblended costs

In the center of the Cost Explorer dashboard, Cost Explorer shows a graph of your current unblended daily costs. You can access the filters and parameters used to create the graph by choosing Explore costs in the upper-right corner. That takes you to the Cost Explorer report page, enabling you to access the default Cost Explorer reports and modify the parameters used to create the chart. The Cost Explorer reports offer additional functionality such as downloading your data as a CSV file and saving your specific parameters as a report. For more information, see Using Cost Explorer reports (p. 28). Your daily unblended costs don't include refunds.

Your monthly unblended costs

Monthly granularity

You can view your unblended costs at the monthly granularity and see the discounts applied to your monthly bill. You can see this by opening the Cost Explorer page and choosing Cost Explorer from the

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Your net unblended costs

navigation pane. Discounts appear as the RI Volume Discount in the chart. The discount amount aligns with the discount amount shown in your Billing and Cost Management console.

To see the details in your Billing and Cost Management console

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Bills.

3. To display the discount, select the arrow next to Total Discounts, under Credits, Total Discounts and Tax Invoices.

Monthly gross charges

You can view your gross monthly charges by excluding the RI Volume Discount.

To exclude RI volume discounts in your monthly view

2. In the left pane, choose Cost Explorer.

3. Choose Cost & Usage.

4. On the Filters pane, choose Charge Type.

5. Select RI Volume Discount.

6. To open a dropdown, select Include only and choose Exclude only.

7. Select Apply ﬁlters.

Your net unblended costs

This enables you to see your net costs after all applicable discounts are calculated. You should still exclude any manual adjustment such as refunds and credits as a best practice. RI Volume Discounts are no longer visible because these are post-discount amounts.

Your recent Cost Explorer reports

At the bottom of the Cost Explorer dashboard is a list of reports that you have accessed recently, when you accessed them, and a link back to the report. This enables you to switch between reports or remember the reports that you ﬁnd most useful.

For more information about Cost Explorer reports, see Using Cost Explorer reports (p. 28).

Your amortized costs

This enables you to see the cost of the RI purchases spread across the usage of the reservation. AWS estimates your amortized costs by combining the unblended upfront and recurring reservation fees and calculating the eﬀective rate of applicable instances. In the daily view, Cost Explorer shows the unused portion of your reservation fees at the ﬁrst of the month or the date of purchase.

Using the Cost Explorer chart

You can view your costs as either a cash-based view with unblended costs or as an accrual-based view. In a cash-based view, your costs are recorded when cash is received or paid. In an accrual-based view, your costs are recorded when income is earned or costs are incurred. You can view data for up to the last 12

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Using the Cost Explorer chart

months and forecast how much you're likely to spend for the next 12 months. You can also specify time ranges for the data and view time data by day or by month.

By default, Cost Explorer uses the Group By filter for the Daily unblended costs graph. When using the Group By filter, the Cost Explorer chart displays data for up to six values in the Group By filter. If your data contains additional values, the chart displays five bars or lines and then aggregates all remaining items in a sixth. The data table that's below the chart breaks out the data for individual services that are aggregated in the chart.

Topics

• Modifying your chart (p. 13)

• Reading the Cost Explorer data table (p. 24)

• Forecasting with Cost Explorer (p. 25)

Modifying your chart

You can modify the parameters that Cost Explorer uses to create your chart to explore diﬀerent sets of data.

• Selecting a style for your chart (p. 13)

• Choosing time ranges for the data that you want to view (p. 13)

• Grouping data by ﬁlter type (p. 15)

• Filtering the data that you want to view (p. 15)

• Choosing advanced options (p. 23)

Selecting a style for your chart

Cost Explorer provides three styles for charting your cost data:

• Bar charts (Bar)

• Stacked bar charts (Stack)

• Line graphs (Line)

You can set the style by using the view dropdown list.

Choosing time ranges for the data that you want to view

You can choose to view your cost data in monthly or daily levels of granularity. You can use preconﬁgured time ranges or set custom start and end dates.

To set the granularity and time range for your data

1. Start Cost Explorer.

2. Choose a time granularity of Daily, Monthly, or Hourly.

Note

To enable hourly granularity, opt in through the Cost Explorer console Preferences page as the management account. When hourly granularity is enabled, information is available for the previous 14 days.

3. For your monthly or daily data, open the calendar and deﬁne a custom time range for your report.

Or, alternatively, choose a preconﬁgured time range (Auto-select) at the bottom of the calendar.

You can choose from a number of historical or forecast time ranges. The name of the time range that you choose appears in the calendar.

4. Choose Apply.

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Historical time range options

In Cost Explorer, months are defined as calendar months. Days are defined as 12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM. Based on these definitions, when you choose Last 3 Months for a date range, you see cost data for the 3 previous months. This doesn't include the present month. For example, if you view your chart on June 6, 2017, and select Last 3 Months, your chart includes data for March, April, and May 2017. All times are in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).

You can choose time ranges for both your past costs and your forecasted future costs.

The following list deﬁnes each time range option for your past costs in Cost Explorer.

• Custom

Displays data for the From and To time range that you specify with calendar controls.

• 1D (Last 1 Day)

Displays cost data from the previous day.

• 7D (Last 7 Days)

Displays cost data from the day before and the previous 6 days.

• Current Month

Displays cost data and forecast data for the current month.

• 3M (Last 3 Months)

Includes cost data from the previous 3 months but doesn't include the current month.

• 6M (Last 6 Months)

• 1Y (Last 12 Months)

• MTD (Month to Date)

Displays cost data from the current calendar month.

• YTD (Year to Date)

Displays cost data from the current calendar year.

Forecast time range options

With the Daily or Monthly time granularity, you have the option to view forecast costs in Cost Explorer.

The following list deﬁnes each time range option for your forecast data. You can select a Historical time range and a Forecasted time range to display together. For example, you can select a Historical time range of 3 months (3M) and select a Forecasted time range of 3 months (+3M). Your report includes historical data for the previous 3 months plus forecasted data for the next 3 months. To clear a Historical time range and see only the forecast, choose the Historical time range option again.

Note

If you choose any forecasted dates, your current date’s cost and usage data shows as Forecast.

The current date’s cost and usage won't include historical data.

• Custom

Displays forecast data for the From and To time range that you specify with calendar controls.

• +1M

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Displays forecast data for the next month. This option is available if you choose the Daily time granularity.

• +3M

Displays forecast data for the next 3 months. This option is available if you choose the Daily or Monthly time granularity.

• +12M

Displays forecast data for the next 12 months. This option is available if you choose the Monthly time granularity.

Grouping data by ﬁlter type

Use the Group by button to have Cost Explorer display the cost data groups by ﬁlter type. By default, Cost Explorer doesn't use grouping. Forecasting isn't available for charts that have grouping. If you don't select a Group by option, Cost Explorer displays total costs for the speciﬁed date range.

To group your data by ﬁlter type

1. Launch Cost Explorer.

2. (Optional) Use the Filters controls to conﬁgure a view of your cost data.

3. Choose a Group by option to group by the category that you want. The data table below the chart also groups your cost ﬁgures by the category that you select.

Filtering the data that you want to view

With Cost Explorer, you can ﬁlter how you view your AWS costs by one or more of the following values:

• API operation

• Availability Zone (AZ)

• Billing Entity

• Charge Types

• Include All

• Instance Type

• Legal Entity

• Linked Account

• Platform

• Purchase Option

• Region

• Service

• Tag

• Tenancy

• Usage Type

• Usage Type Group

You can use Cost Explorer to see which service you use the most, which Availability Zone (AZ) most of your traffic is in, and which member account uses AWS the most. You can also apply multiple filters to look at intersecting datasets. For example, you can use the Linked Account and Services filters to identify the member account that spent the most money on Amazon EC2.

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To ﬁlter your data

1. Open Cost Explorer.

2. For Filters, choose a value. After you make a selection, a new control appears with additional options.

3. In the new control, select the items from each list that you want to display in the chart. Or, start typing in the search box to have Cost Explorer autocomplete your selection. After you choose your ﬁlters, choose Apply ﬁlters.

Note

Each time that you apply ﬁlters to your costs, Cost Explorer creates a new chart. However, you can use your browser's bookmark feature to save conﬁguration settings (p. 33) for repeated use. Forecasts aren't saved, and Cost Explorer displays the most recent forecast when you revisit your saved chart.

You can continue refining your cost analysis by using multiple filters, grouping your data by filter type, and choosing Advanced Options tab options.

Combining ﬁlters to show data in common

Cost Explorer displays a chart that represents the data in common to all the filters that you have selected. You can use this view to analyze subsets of cost data. For example, assume that you set the Service filter to show costs that are related to Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS services and then select Reserved using the Purchase Option filter. The cost chart will show how much money Reserved instances on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS cost for each of the three months.

Note

• AWS Cost and Usage Reports in Cost Explorer can use a maximum of 1024 ﬁlters.

• You can ﬁlter RI Utilization reports by only one service at a time. You can do this only for the following services:

• Amazon EC2

• Amazon Redshift

• Amazon RDS

• ElastiCache

• OpenSearch Service

Filters and logical operations (AND/OR)

When you select multiple filters and multiple values for each filter, Cost Explorer applies rules that emulate the logical AND and OR operators to your selections. Within each filter, Cost Explorer emulates the logical OR filter to your selection of filter types. This means that the resulting chart adds the aggregate costs for each item together. Using the previous example, you see bars for both of the selected services, Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

When you select multiple ﬁlters, Cost Explorer applies the logical AND operator to your selections.

For a more concrete example, assume that you use the Services ﬁlter and specify Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS costs for inclusion and then also apply the Purchase Options ﬁlter to select a single type of purchase option. You will see only the Non-Reserved charges incurred by Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

Filter and group options

In Cost Explorer, you can ﬁlter by the following groups:

• API Operation

Requests made to and tasks performed by a service, such as write and get requests to Amazon S3.

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• Availability Zone

Distinct locations within a Region that are insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. They provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

• Billing Entity

The organization that bills the customer for a service. For AWS service charges, AWS is the billing entity. For third-party services sold through AWS Marketplace, AWS Marketplace is the billing entity.

• Instance Type

The type of RI that you speciﬁed when you launched an Amazon EC2 host, Amazon RDS instance class, Amazon Redshift node, or Amazon ElastiCache node. The instance type determines the hardware of the computer used to host your instance.

• Legal Entity

The provider of your AWS services. For AWS service charges, AWS is the legal entity. For AWS service charges in India, AISPL is the legal entity.

• Linked Account

The member accounts in an organization. For more information, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations.

• Platform

The operating system that your RI runs on. Platform is either Linux or Windows.

• Purchase Option

The method you choose to pay for your Amazon EC2 instances. This includes Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Scheduled Reserved Instances, and On-Demand Instances.

• Region

The geographic areas where AWS hosts your resources.

• Resources

The unique identiﬁer for your resources.

Note

To enable resource granularity, opt-in through on the Cost Explorer settings page as the management account. This is available for Amazon EC2 instances.

• Service

AWS products. To learn what's available, see AWS Products and Services. You can use this dimension to ﬁlter costs by speciﬁc AWS Marketplace software, including your costs for AMIs, web services, and desktop apps. See the What is AWS Marketplace? guide for more information.

Note

You can only ﬁlter RI Utilization reports by one service at a time and only for these services:

Amazon EC2, Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and ElastiCache.

• Tag

A label that you can use to track the costs associated with speciﬁc areas or entities within your business. For more information about working with tags, see Applying User-Deﬁned Cost Allocation Tags.

• Tenancy

Speciﬁes if the Amazon EC2 instance is hosted on shared or single-tenant hardware. Some tenancy values include Shared (Default), Dedicated, and Host.

• Usage Type

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Usage types are the units that each service uses to measure the usage of a speciﬁc type of resource.

For example, the BoxUsage:t2.micro(Hrs) usage type ﬁlters by the running hours of Amazon EC2 t2.micro instances.

• Usage Type Group

Usage type groups are filters that collect a specific category of usage type filters into one filter. For example, BoxUsage:c1.medium(Hrs), BoxUsage:m3.xlarge(Hrs), and

BoxUsage:t1.micro(Hrs) are all ﬁlters for Amazon EC2 instance running hours, so they are collected into the EC2: Running Hours ﬁlter.

Usage type groups are available for Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, and Amazon S3. The speciﬁc groups available to your account depend on what services you've used. The list of groups that might be available includes but isn't limited to the following:

• DDB: Data Transfer - Internet (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to your DynamoDB databases.

• DDB: Data Transfer - Internet (Out)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from your DynamoDB databases.

• DDB: Indexed Data Storage

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that you have stored in DynamoDB.

• DDB: Provisioned Throughput Capacity - Read

Filters by the costs associated with how many units of read capacity that your DynamoDB databases used.

• DDB: Provisioned Throughput Capacity - Write

Filters by the costs associated with how many units of write capacity that your DynamoDB databases used.

• EC2: CloudWatch - Alarms

Filters by the costs associated with how many CloudWatch alarms that you have.

• EC2: CloudWatch - Metrics

Filters by the costs associated with how many CloudWatch metrics that you have.

• EC2: CloudWatch - Requests

Filters by the costs associated with how many CloudWatch requests that you make.

• EC2: Data Transfer - CloudFront (Out)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from your Amazon EC2 instances to a CloudFront distribution.

• EC2: Data Transfer - CloudFront (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to your Amazon EC2 instances from a CloudFront distribution.

• EC2: Data Transfer - Inter AZ

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into, out of, or between your Amazon EC2 instances in diﬀerent AZs.

• EC2: Data Transfer - Internet (In)

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• EC2: Data Transfer - Internet (Out)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from an Amazon EC2 instance to a host outside the AWS network.

• EC2: Data Transfer - Region to Region (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to your Amazon EC2 instances from a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• EC2: Data Transfer - Region to Region (Out)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from your Amazon EC2 instances to a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• EC2: EBS - I/O Requests

Filters by the costs associated with how many I/O requests that you make to your Amazon EBS volumes.

• EC2: EBS - Magnetic

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that you have stored on Amazon EBS Magnetic volumes.

• EC2: EBS - Provisioned IOPS

Filters by the costs associated with how many IOPS-months that you have provisioned for Amazon EBS.

• EC2: EBS - SSD(gp2)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB per month of General Purpose storage that your Amazon EBS volumes use.

• EC2: EBS - SSD(io1)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB per month of Provisioned IOPS SSD storage that your Amazon EBS volumes use.

• EC2: EBS - Snapshots

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB per month that your Amazon EBS snapshots store.

• EC2: EBS - Optimized

Filters by the costs associated with how many MB per instance hour that your Amazon EBS- optimized instances use.

• EC2: ELB - Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your Elastic Load Balancing load balancers ran.

• EC2: Elastic IP - Additional Address

Filters by the costs associated with how many Elastic IP addresses that you attached to running Amazon EC2 instances.

• EC2: Elastic IP - Idle Address

Filters by the costs associated with Elastic IP addresses that you have that aren't attached to running Amazon EC2 instances.

• EC2: NAT Gateway - Data Processed

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• EC2: NAT Gateway - Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your NAT gateways ran.

• EC2: Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your Amazon EC2 instances ran.

This Usage Type Group contains only the following Usage Types:

• BoxUsage

• DedicatedUsage

• HostBoxUsage

• HostUsage

• ReservedHostUsage

• SchedUsage

• SpotUsage

• UnusedBox

• ElastiCache: Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your Amazon ElastiCache nodes ran.

• ElastiCache: Storage

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that you stored in Amazon ElastiCache.

• RDS: Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your Amazon RDS databases ran.

This Usage Type Group contains only the following Usage Types:

• AlwaysOnUsage

• BoxUsage

• DedicatedUsage

• HighUsage

• InstanceUsage

• MirrorUsage

• Multi-AZUsage

• SpotUsage

• RDS: Data Transfer – CloudFront – In

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into Amazon RDS from a CloudFront distribution.

• RDS: Data Transfer – CloudFront – Out

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from a CloudFront distribution to Amazon RDS data transfers.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Direct Connect Locations – In

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into Amazon RDS through a Direct Connect network connection.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Direct Connect Locations – Out

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from Amazon RDS through a Direct

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Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into, out of, or between Amazon RDS buckets in diﬀerent Availability Zones.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Internet – In

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to your Amazon RDS databases.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Internet – Out

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from your Amazon RDS databases.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Region to Region – In

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to your Amazon RDS instances from a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• RDS: Data Transfer – Region to Region – Out

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from your Amazon RDS instances to a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• RDS: I/O Requests

Filters by the costs associated with how many I/O requests that you make to your Amazon RDS instance.

• RDS: Provisioned IOPS

Filters by the costs associated with how many IOPS-months that you have provisioned for Amazon RDS.

• RDS: Storage

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that you have stored in Amazon RDS.

• Redshift: DataScanned

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that your Amazon Redshift nodes scanned.

• Redshift: Running Hours

Filters by the costs associated with how many hours that your Amazon Redshift nodes ran.

• S3: API Requests - Standard

Filters by the costs associated with GET and all other standard storage Amazon S3 requests.

• S3: Data Transfer - CloudFront (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into Amazon S3 from a CloudFront distribution.

• S3: Data Transfer - CloudFront (Out)

Filters by costs associated with how many GB are transferred from a CloudFront distribution to Amazon S3 data transfers, such as how much data was uploaded from your Amazon S3 bucket to your CloudFront distribution.

• S3: Data Transfer - Inter AZ

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred into, out of, or between Amazon S3 buckets in diﬀerent Availability Zones.

• S3: Data Transfer - Internet (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to an Amazon S3 bucket from

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Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from an Amazon S3 bucket to a host outside the AWS network.

• S3: Data Transfer - Region to Region (In)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred to Amazon S3 from a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• S3: Data Transfer - Region to Region (Out)

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB are transferred from Amazon S3 to a diﬀerent AWS Region.

• S3: Storage - Standard

Filters by the costs associated with how many GB that you have stored in Amazon S3.

• Charge Type

Charge types are diﬀerent types of charges or fees.

Credit

Any AWS credits that are applied to your account.

Other out-of-cycle charges

Any subscription charges that aren't upfront reservation charges or support charges.

Recurring reservation fee

Any recurring charges to your account. When you purchase a Partial Upfront or No Upfront Reserved Instance from AWS, you pay a recurring charge in exchange for a lower rate for using the instance. The recurring fees can result in spikes on the ﬁrst day of every month, when AWS charges your account.

Refund

Any refunds that you received. Refunds are listed as a separate line item in the data table. They don't appear as an item in the chart because they represent a negative value in the calculation of your costs. The chart displays only positive values.

Reservation applied usage

Usage that AWS applied reservation discounts to.

Savings Plan upfront fee

Any one-time upfront fee from your purchase of an All Upfront or Partial Upfront Savings Plan.

Savings Plan recurring fee

Any recurring hourly charges that correspond with your No Upfront or Partial Upfront Savings Plan. The Savings Plan recurring fee is initially added to your bill on the day that you purchase a No Upfront or Partial Upfront Savings Plan. After the initial purchase, AWS adds the recurring fee to the ﬁrst day of each billing period thereafter.

Savings Plan covered usage

Any on-demand cost that's covered by your Savings Plan. In an Unblended costs view, this represents the covered usage at on-demand rates. In an Amortized costs view, this represents the covered usage at your Savings Plan rates. Savings Plan covered usage line items are oﬀset by the corresponding Savings Plan negation items.

Savings Plan negation

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Support fee

Any charges that AWS charges you for a support plan. When you purchase a support plan from AWS, you pay a monthly charge in exchange for service support. The monthly fees can result in spikes on the ﬁrst day of every month, when AWS charges your account.

Tax

Any taxes that are associated with the charges or fees in your cost chart. Cost Explorer adds all taxes together as a single component of your costs. If you select five or fewer filters, Cost Explorer displays your tax expenses as a single bar. If you select six or more filters, Cost Explorer displays five bars, stacks, or lines, and then aggregates all remaining items, including taxes, into a sixth bar, stack slice, or plot line that's labeled Other.

If you choose to omit RI upfront fees, RI recurring charges, or Support charges from your chart, Cost Explorer continues to include any taxes that are associated with the charges.

Cost Explorer displays your tax costs in the chart only when you choose Monthly drop down.

When you ﬁlter your cost chart, the following rules govern the inclusion of taxes:

1. Taxes are excluded if you select non-Linked Account ﬁlters, either singly or in combination with other ﬁlters.

2. Taxes are included if you select the Linked Accounts ﬁlters.

Upfront reservation fee

Any upfront fees that are charged to your account. When you purchase an All Upfront or Partial Upfront Reserved Instance from AWS, you pay an upfront fee in exchange for a lower rate for using the instance. The upfront fees can result in spikes in the chart for the days or months when you make your purchases.

Usage

Usage that AWS didn't apply reservation discounts to.

Choosing advanced options

You can customize how you view your data in Cost Explorer using Advanced Options to include or exclude speciﬁc types of data.

To exclude data from your chart

Open the AWS Cost Management at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home.

• In the right pane, under Advanced Options, under Include costs related to, deselect the data type that you want to exclude.

In addition to the costs that Cost Explorer includes, you can show speciﬁc costs such as untagged resources or blended costs. By doing this, you also see the following alternate views of your costs.

Show only untagged resources

By default, Cost Explorer includes costs both for resources that have cost allocation tags and for resources that don't have cost allocation tags. To ﬁnd untagged resources that add to your costs, select Show only untagged resources. For more information about cost allocation tags, see Using Cost Allocation Tags.

Show only uncategorized resources

By default, Cost Explorer includes costs both for resources that are mapped to a cost category and for resources that aren’t mapped to a cost category. To ﬁnd uncategorized resources that add to

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your costs, select Show only uncategorized resources. For more information about cost categories, see Managing your costs with AWS Cost Categories.

Show blended costs

This cost metric reﬂects the average cost of usage across the consolidated billing family. If you use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations, you can view costs using blended rates. For more information, see Blended Rates and Costs.

Show unblended costs

This cost metric reﬂects the cost of the usage. When grouped by charge type, unblended costs separate discounts into their own line items. This enables you to view the amount of each discount received.

Show net unblended costs

This cost metric reﬂects the cost after discounts.

Show amortized costs

This cost metric reflects the effective cost of the upfront and monthly reservation fees spread across the billing period. By default, Cost Explorer shows the fees for Reserved Instances as a spike on the day that you're charged. However, if you choose to show costs as amortized costs, the costs are amortized over the billing period. This means that the costs are broken out into the effective daily rate. AWS estimates your amortized costs by combining your unblended costs with the amortized portion of your upfront and recurring reservation fees. For the daily view, Cost Explorer shows the unused portion of your upfront reservation fees and recurring RI charges on the first of the month.

For example, suppose that Alejandro purchases a Partial Upfront t2.micro RI for a one-year term at $30 dollars upfront. The monthly fee is $2.48. Cost Explorer shows the costs for this RI as a spike on the first of the month. If Alejandro chooses Amortized costs for a 30-day month, the Cost Explorer chart shows a daily effective rate of $0.165. This is the EC2 effective rate multiplied by the number of hours in a day.

Amortized costs aren't available for billing periods before 2018. If you want to see how much of your reservation was unused, group by purchase option.

Show net amortized costs

This cost metric amortizes the upfront and monthly reservation fees while including discounts such as RI volume discounts.

You can show these speciﬁc costs by using the following procedure.

To show speciﬁc cost types in your chart

Open the AWS Cost Management at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home.

• In the right pane, under Advanced Options, under Other, select the cost type that you want to show.

Reading the Cost Explorer data table

A data table follows each Cost Explorer chart. The data table displays the cost figures that the chart represents. If your chart is using a grouping, the data table displays the aggregate amounts for the filter types that you choose for your chart. If your chart isn't using a grouping, the table displays the aggregate amounts for your past and forecasted cost data. You can download (p. 33) the .csv file that contains the complete data set for your chart.

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Note

For the RI Utilization and Savings report, the maximum table size is 20 rows. If the data exceeds this, it appears in a truncated form.

In the grouped data table, each row is a value for one of the ﬁlter type options: API operations,

Availability Zones, AWS services, custom cost allocation tags, instance types, member accounts, purchase options, Region, usage type, or usage type group. The columns represent time intervals. For example, the data table shows the costs for selected services for the last three months in separate columns.. Then, the last column of the data table shows the aggregated total for the 3 months.

Note

Data transfer costs are included in the services that they're associated with, such as Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3. They aren't represented as either a separate line item in the data table or a bar in the chart.

In the ungrouped data table, the row is your costs. The columns represent time intervals.

Forecasting with Cost Explorer

You create a forecast by selecting a future time range for your report. For more information, see Choosing time ranges for the data that you want to view (p. 13). The following section discusses the accuracy of the forecasts created by Cost Explorer and how to read them.

A forecast is a prediction of how much you will use AWS services over the forecast time period that you selected. This forecast is based on your past usage. You can use a forecast to estimate your AWS bill and set alarms and budgets for based on predictions. Because forecasts are predictions, the forecasted billing amounts are estimated and might diﬀer from your actual charges for each statement period.

Like weather forecasts, billing forecasts can vary in accuracy. Diﬀerent ranges of accuracy have diﬀerent prediction intervals. The higher the prediction interval, the more likely the forecast has a wider

range. For example, suppose that you have a budget set to 100 dollars for a given month. An 80%

prediction interval might forecast your spend between 90 and 100, with a mean of 95. The range in the prediction band is dependent on your historical spend volatility, or ﬂuctuations. The more consistent and predictable the historical spend, the narrower the prediction range in forecast spend.

Cost Explorer forecasts have a prediction interval of 80%. If AWS doesn't have enough data to forecast an 80% prediction interval, Cost Explorer doesn't provide a forecast. This is common for accounts that have less than one full billing cycle.

Reading forecasts

How you read the Cost Explorer forecasts depends on the type of chart that you're using. Forecasts are available for both line charts and bar charts.

The 80% prediction interval appears diﬀerently on each type of chart:

• Line charts represent the prediction interval as a set of lines that are on either side of your costs line.

• Bar charts represent the prediction interval as two lines that are on either side of the top of your bar.

If you receive discounts, we encourage you to use Show net unblended costs when forecasting your monthly costs to include discounts. Unblended costs don't include discounts. Instead, they separate discounts into their own line item. For more information about diﬀerent costs, see Cost Explorer Advanced Options (p. 23).

Using forecasts with consolidated billing

If you use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations, the forecasts are calculated with the data from all the accounts. If you add a new member account to an organization, forecasts don't include

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Using the AWS Cost Explorer API

that new member account until the new spending patterns of the organization are analyzed. For more information about consolidated billing, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations.

Using the AWS Cost Explorer API

The Cost Explorer API allows you to programmatically query your cost and usage data. You can query for aggregated data such as total monthly costs or total daily usage. You can also query for granular data, such as the number of daily write operations for DynamoDB database tables in your production environment.

If you use a programming language that AWS provides an SDK for, we recommend that you use the SDK.

All the AWS SDKs greatly simplify the process of signing requests and save you a signiﬁcant amount of time when compared with using the AWS Cost Explorer API. In addition, the SDKs integrate easily with your development environment and provide easy access to related commands.

For more information about available SDKs, see Tools for Amazon Web Services. For more information about the AWS Cost Explorer API, see the AWS Billing and Cost Management API Reference.

Service endpoint

The Cost Explorer API provides the following endpoint:

https://ce.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Granting IAM permissions to use the AWS Cost Explorer API

An IAM user must be granted explicit permission to query the AWS Cost Explorer API. For the policy that grants the necessary permissions to an IAM user, see View costs and usage (p. 101).

Best practices for the AWS Cost Explorer API

The following are best practices when working with the Cost Explorer API.

Topics

• Best practices for conﬁguring access to the Cost Explorer API (p. 26)

• Best practices for querying the Cost Explorer API (p. 27)

• Best practices for optimizing your Cost Explorer API costs (p. 27)

Best practices for conﬁguring access to the Cost Explorer API

An IAM user must be granted explicit permission to query the Cost Explorer API. Granting an IAM user access to the Cost Explorer API gives that user query access to any cost and usage data available to that account. For the policy that grants the necessary permissions to an IAM user, see View costs and usage (p. 101).

When conﬁguring access to the Cost Explorer API, we recommend creating a unique IAM user for allowing programmatic access. If you want to give multiple IAM users query access to the Cost Explorer API, we recommend creating a programmatic access IAM role for each of them.

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Best practices for the AWS Cost Explorer API

Best practices for querying the Cost Explorer API

When querying the Cost Explorer API, we recommend using filtering conditions to refine your queries so that you receive only the data that you need. You can do this by restricting the time range to a smaller interval or by using filters to limit the result set that your request returns. This enables your queries to return data more quickly than if you're accessing a larger set of data.

Adding one or more grouping dimensions to your query can increase the size of your result and can impact query performance. Depending on your use case, it can make sense to ﬁlter your data instead.

The Cost Explorer API can access up to 12 months of historical data and data for the current month. It can also provide 3 months of cost forecast data at the daily level of granularity and 12 months of cost forecast data at the monthly level of granularity.

Best practices for optimizing your Cost Explorer API costs

Because you're charged for the Cost Explorer API per paginated request, we recommend identifying the exact dataset to access before submitting queries.

AWS billing information is updated up to three times daily. Typical workloads and use cases for the Cost Explorer API anticipate a call pattern cadence ranging from daily to several times per day. To receive the most up-to-date data available, query for the time period that you're interested in.

If you're creating an application using the Cost Explorer API, we recommend architecting the application so that it has a caching layer. This enables you to regularly update the underlying data for your end users, but doesn't trigger queries every time that an individual in your organization accesses it.

AWS Cost Management

AWS Cost Management

User Guide

AWS Cost Management: User Guide

Table of Contents

What is AWS Cost Management?

Features of AWS Cost Management

Getting started

Step 1: Sign up for AWS

Step 2: Attach the required IAM policy to an IAM identity

Step 3: Review your bills and usage

To open the Billing console and view your usage and charges

Step 4: Set up your AWS Cost Management features

What do I do next?

Using the Billing and Cost Management API

Learn more

Getting help

AWS Knowledge Center

To ﬁnd your question or request

Contacting AWS Support

To contact AWS Support

To contact AWS Support when you can't sign in to AWS

Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer

Enabling Cost Explorer

Note

To sign up for Cost Explorer

Controlling access for Cost Explorer

Granting Cost Explorer access

Controlling access using Cost Explorer preferences

Organizations account status use cases

Controlling member accounts’ access using Cost Explorer preferences

To control member account access to Cost Explorer data

Cost Explorer and IAM users

Getting started with Cost Explorer

Starting Cost Explorer

To open Cost Explorer

Exploring your data using Cost Explorer

Note

Navigating Cost Explorer

Your Cost Explorer costs

Your Cost Explorer trends

Your daily unblended costs

Your monthly unblended costs

Monthly granularity

To see the details in your Billing and Cost Management console

Monthly gross charges

To exclude RI volume discounts in your monthly view

Your net unblended costs

Your recent Cost Explorer reports

Your amortized costs

Using the Cost Explorer chart

Modifying your chart

Selecting a style for your chart

Choosing time ranges for the data that you want to view

To set the granularity and time range for your data

Note

Note

Grouping data by ﬁlter type

To group your data by ﬁlter type

Filtering the data that you want to view

To ﬁlter your data

Note

Note

Note

Note

Choosing advanced options

To exclude data from your chart

To show speciﬁc cost types in your chart

Reading the Cost Explorer data table

Note

Note

Forecasting with Cost Explorer

Reading forecasts

Using forecasts with consolidated billing

Using the AWS Cost Explorer API

Service endpoint

Granting IAM permissions to use the AWS Cost Explorer API

Best practices for the AWS Cost Explorer API

Best practices for conﬁguring access to the Cost Explorer API

Best practices for querying the Cost Explorer API