What is AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool for visualizing, analyzing, and managing your AWS costs and usage. You can break down spending by various dimensions such as service, account, region, or custom tags and analyze trends over up to 13 months of historical data along with an 18-month forecast.
Cost Explorer uses the same dataset as the AWS Cost and Usage Report. Through integration with Amazon Q Developer, you can ask questions about costs in natural language; the answers automatically update charts, filters, and time periods and provide explanations of cost trends, top drivers, and anomalies.
Core Features
- Cost Visualization: Interactive charts and preconfigured reports for all AWS spending
- Filters and Grouping: Analysis by service, account, region, tag, or time
- Reserved Instance Recommendations: Recommendations based on actual usage
- Cost Forecasting: Prediction of costs up to 18 months ahead
- Amazon Q Developer Integration: Cost analyses and explanations via natural-language queries
Typical Use Cases
Monthly Cost Analysis: Analyze your AWS bill and identify the biggest cost drivers. Cost Explorer shows which services, accounts, or projects incur the most costs and how spending is trending.
Chargeback and Showback: Allocate AWS costs to internal teams or projects. With Cost Allocation Tags, you can break down costs by cost centers and automate internal billing.
AI-Assisted Cost Analysis: Ask questions like “Why did my EC2 costs increase last month?” directly in natural language and get automatically generated answers with charts via Amazon Q Developer.
Benefits
- Free use of the Cost Explorer interface in the console
- Automatic Reserved Instance recommendations based on real usage
- Integration with AWS Budgets for proactive cost control
- AI-powered natural-language analysis via Amazon Q Developer
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with AWS Cost Explorer: cost analysis, implementation of tagging strategies, planning of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, and continuous cost optimization.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool for visualizing and analyzing your AWS costs and usage. You can filter costs by service, account, tag, or time period, view up to 13 months of historical data, and identify trends to find optimization opportunities.
What does AWS Cost Explorer cost?
Using the Cost Explorer interface in the AWS console is free. Programmatic access via the Cost Explorer API is billed per request.
How does Cost Explorer differ from AWS Budgets?
Cost Explorer analyzes historical and current costs and generates forecasts. AWS Budgets lets you set budget thresholds and sends alerts when they are exceeded. Both tools complement each other for effective cost management.
What recommendations and AI features does Cost Explorer provide?
Cost Explorer provides Reserved Instance recommendations based on your usage and forecasts costs up to 18 months ahead. Through integration with Amazon Q Developer, you can ask questions about your costs in natural language and receive automatically generated analyses of cost drivers and anomalies.
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