How can I use Cost Explorer to analyze my spending and usage?

Short description

With Cost Explorer, you can do the following:

• Review the charges and usage associated with your account.
• View and create reports for your cost and usage data.
• Forecast estimated spending for the next 3 months.
• Get recommendations on utilization and coverage of your Reserved Instances (RIs).
• Get recommendations on utilization and coverage of your Savings Plans.

Resolution

First, launch Cost Explorer for your account through these steps:

1. Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
2. From the navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer.

After you launch Cost Explorer, you might need to wait up to 24 hours for cost and usage data to populate.

To view pre-configured reports for your cost and usage data, complete the following steps:

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console.
2. From the navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer Saved Reports.
3. Select a report name to analyze your costs.

To create custom reports for your cost and usage data, follow these steps:

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console.
2. From the navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer Saved Reports.
3. Choose New Report, and then select a report type that you want to create.
4. Choose Create Report, and then choose Save as to save the report for later use.

Compare your month-to-month costs

To compare your month-to-month costs, use the Monthly costs by service report. By default, the chart displays the five services with the highest costs. However, the table also includes cost data for all the services that you've used.

You can also investigate temporary spikes in your billing with the Monthly costs by service report. After you open the report, under Monthly, select Daily instead.

Understand costs for your resources by service

To compare your costs by service, complete the following steps:

1. Open the Service filter.
2. Select the services that you want to investigate in Filters.
3. Choose Apply Filters.
4. For Group by, select Usage Type.

For example, to see how much you're billed for data transfer for Elastic Load Balancing, select the EC2-ELB service in Filters. For Group by, select Usage Type. Then, look for data transfer.

View costs by cost allocation tag

To view costs by cost allocation tag, for Group by, select Tag. If you don't have any cost allocation tags, then the Tag option isn't available. When you create a new cost allocation tag, you might need to wait up to 3 days for the tag to appear in Cost Explorer.

View unblended cost data for an organization

To view unblended cost data for member accounts in an organization, go to Advanced Options. Then, select Unblended costs for Show costs as.

View taxes by account

To view taxes for each account, complete these steps:

1. For Group by, choose Linked account.
2. Open the Service filter, and then choose Tax.

View RI utilization

To view your RI utilization, select Cost Explorer Saved Reports from the navigation pane. Then, under Report name, choose RI Utilization. Or, select Utilization Report, located under Reservations in the navigation pane. You can use the report to view the following:

• View the combined usage of all your purchased RIs in the chart and the utilization of individual RIs in the table.
• View the utilization of your RIs as the percentage of purchased RI hours in the chart.
• View the number of RI hours used against the number of RI hours purchased in the table.
• Select a single RI or a group of RIs in the table to view their respective utilization in the chart.
• Use the information in the table to track the number of RI hours that you reserved but did not use.

For more information, see RI utilization reports.

View RI coverage

To view your RI coverage, choose Cost Explorer Saved Reports from the navigation pane. Then, under Report name, choose RI Coverage. Or, choose Coverage Report, located under Reservations in the navigation pane. Use the report to review the following:

• See the number of instance hours that your RIs covered in the chart.
• Track the number of hours that you've used and how many of those your RIs covered.
• View the number of hours that RIs cover against On-Demand Instance hours in the table.
• Select a single RI or a group of RIs in the table to view their respective coverage in the chart.

For more information, see RI coverage reports.

View your RI recommendations

To view your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) RI recommendations and estimated annual savings, choose Recommendations, located under Reservations in the navigation pane.The RI recommendations provided are based on your past Amazon EC2 usage.

View your Savings Plans recommendations

To view your Savings Plans recommendations and estimated savings, complete the following steps:

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console.
2. Choose Recommendations, located under Savings Plans in the navigation pane.
3. Use the Recommendation parameters to select a Savings Plan type. Then, select Recommendation options based on your preferred term length, payment option, and past usage.

The Recommendations table provides Monthly On-Demand Spend, Estimated Monthly Spend, Estimated Monthly Savings, and Recommended Savings Plans.

Note: It might take up to 24 hours after a Savings Plan purchase for the Savings Plan Recommendations to update.

View Savings Plans

To view purchased Savings Plans and when they expire choose Inventory, located under Savings Plans in the navigation pane.

View Savings Plans utilization

To view your Savings Plans utilization, choose Utilization report, located under Savings Plans in the navigation pane. The Utilization report shows the percentage of your Savings Plans commitments used across your applicable usage.

View Savings Plans coverage

To view your Savings Plans coverage, choose Coverage report, located under Savings Plans in the navigation pane. The Coverage report shows how much of your applicable usage that Savings Plans cover.

Related information

Analyzing your costs and usage with AWS Cost Explorer

Understanding reservations in Cost Explorer

Tag your resources for billing