AWS Cost Tracking

Question

We have migrated five applications onto to AWS cloud (lift & shift) last year. We use most of the main AWS services, reserved and on-demand instances, RDS, ACM, SSM, etc. How do we track the cost of each application?

Andrii S · Accepted Answer

Hello.

**AWS Cost Explorer:** AWS Cost Explorer is a built-in tool that provides a comprehensive view of your AWS spending. You can use it to filter and analyze costs based on various dimensions, including tags, service usage, and time intervals. To track costs by application, you can create custom tags for your resources and allocate them to specific applications. Then, use these tags to filter your cost data.

Best regards, Andrii

Mike S · Answer

Another option would be to run each application in its own account, or even group of accounts.  One common pattern is to have a separate account for each environment of an application; i.e. one for production, one for QA, one for development, etc.  [AWS Organizations](https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/) will let you consolidate those accounts' usage into a single bill that's split by account, and you can use Cost Explorer as previously mentioned for visualization on the fly.

kentrad · Answer

Tagging the resources is the key and then using those tags as Cost Allocation tags. This is a good starting point: Cost Allocation Blog Series #1: Cost Allocation Basics That You Need to Know.

This is another good resource: Best Practices for Tagging AWS Resources.

This is another good resource: [Best Practices for Tagging AWS Resources](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/tagging-best-practices/tagging-best-practices.html).

AWS Cost Tracking

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