Cost Explorer is a user-friendly interface that provides customizable reports about your AWS costs. These historical data about your usage and costs allow you to understand your spending patterns and to identify areas that can benefit from cost optimisation.
For instance, a web hosting company can use AWS Cost Explorer to track the cost of each hosted website. By setting up tags for each website, management can analyse the usage and cost for every site and make informed decisions based on the collected data.
Cost Explorer is also highly useful for Reserved Instance (RI) reporting. Organizations can track their RI utilization and coverage, ensuring that they are getting the most from this cost-saving strategic commitment.
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets allow you to set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when the defined thresholds are breached. This tool permits you to manage your costs proactively and brings cost deviations to your attention promptly.
Consider the use-case of a small company with a tight IT budget. AWS Budgets can alert them when usage or costs exceed agreed limits, allowing early intervention to prevent overspending. Similarly, for project-based work, AWS Budgets can assist in ensuring that costs stay within the allocated budget across different phases of a project.
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
This service provides comprehensive data about your AWS costs and usage. Cost and Usage Reports are delivered in csv format and stored in a designated S3 bucket, from where they can be analysed with business intelligence tools or queried with SQL queries.
A powerful feature of the Cost and Usage Reports is the ability to include resource-level information. This allows you to examine the costs and usage associated with individual resources and relate these costs back to the responsible business units, workloads or projects.
A use-case for this service could be a multinational enterprise. By using Cost and Usage Reports, such an organization can break down costs per business unit, region, or product, yielding insights into where costs are being incurred and enabling accurate cost allocation.
In conclusion, tools like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and AWS Cost and Usage Reports provide comprehensive cost and usage visualizations. They help stakeholders to understand their AWS usage patterns, manage costs and resources effectively, and plan for future needs. While the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam may not necessitate coding proficiency with these tools, knowing how to effectively use them will prove very beneficial in a real-world environment.
Practice Test
True or False: AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize your AWS usage patterns and cost trends over time.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer provides detailed information about your costs and usage, enabling you to analyze past trends and predict your future AWS spend.
True or False: AWS Cost and Usage Report can only be generated on a yearly basis.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: AWS Cost and Usage Report can generate daily, monthly, or yearly reports based on required frequency and level of detail.
AWS Budgets is primarily used for:
- A. Predicting future AWS spend
- B. Providing alerts when your usage exceeds your budgeted amount
- C. Automating the process of creating and managing AWS resources
- D. Reducing cost by turning off unused resources
Answer: B. Providing alerts when your usage exceeds your budgeted amount
Explanation: AWS Budgets enables you to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive alerts through email or SNS when your usage exceeds your budgeted amount.
Which of the following can AWS Cost Explorer help identify? (Multiple Select)
- A. Trends in engineer hiring costs
- B. Top AWS service costs
- C. Areas of untagged and unused resources
- D. Location of physical AWS data centers
Answer: B. Top AWS service costs and C. Areas of untagged and unused resources
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer provides insights into your cost drivers and usage trends, including top AWS service costs and unused resources.
True or False: AWS Cost and Usage Report can be used to allocate shared costs.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Cost and Usage Report provides detailed billing records, including allocation of shared costs among AWS services and accounts.
AWS Budgets uses historical data to:
- A. Predict future cloud spend
- B. Allocate shared costs
- C. Enable data backup and recovery
- D. Automate tasks
Answer: A. Predict future cloud spend
Explanation: AWS Budgets uses historical AWS data to forecast future usage and spend patterns.
True or False: AWS Cost Explorer is a paid tool.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer is free of charge and available to all AWS customers.
AWS Cost and Usage Report provides detailed AWS billing records in what format?
- A. PDF
- B. CSV
- C. Audio
- D. Video
Answer: B. CSV
Explanation: AWS Cost and Usage Report is delivered in a CSV (comma-separated values) format.
Multi-factor authentication is recommended for access to which of the following?
- A. AWS Budgets
- B. AWS Cost and Usage Report
- C. AWS Cost Explorer
- D. All of the above
Answer: D. All of the above
Explanation: Multi-factor authentication is recommended for all AWS services to enhance security.
True or False: AWS Budgets can provide a granular view of your AWS costs and usage.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Budgets enables you to break down cost or usage by various dimensions such as service, linked account, tags, etc. providing a detailed view of your spend.
Interview Questions
What is the function of the AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can view your cost data up to the last 13 months, forecast how much you are likely to spend for the next three months and use this data to identify areas that need attention.
How can AWS Budgets assist in cost management?
AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount. This allows for proactive cost management and prevents unexpected charges.
What is the purpose of the AWS Cost and Usage Report?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report is a comprehensive dataset with detailed breakdowns of the costs associated with AWS services. It also provides insights into cost drivers and usage trends, aiding users in optimizing costs and making cost-effective choices.
How does AWS Cost Explorer help in forecasting costs?
AWS Cost Explorer uses your historical AWS cost data to predict your AWS costs over the next three months. This is beneficial for budgeting and planning purposes and allows you to adjust your usage if necessary.
Can you use AWS Budgets to manage AWS Reserved Instances?
Yes, AWS Budgets can be used to track the utilization and coverage of your AWS Reserved Instances. It will send alerts when your Reserved Instance utilization drops below the threshold you define, helping you to maximize your savings.
What kinds of data can the AWS Cost and Usage Report provide?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report provides granular details about your AWS costs and usage, showing data at the hourly or daily level, and categorizing usage by product, resource, and tags.
How does the AWS Cost Explorer support use-case based analyses?
AWS Cost Explorer provides pre-configured views for common scenarios, like identifying areas of untagged resources or discovering under-utilized resources. It also allows users to create and save their custom cost and usage reports to support specific analyses.
Can AWS Budgets be used to set usage budgets for specific AWS services?
Yes, with AWS Budgets, you can set usage budgets for specific services and receive alerts when your usage exceeds the budgeted amount, helping you to manage your costs effectively at the service level.
Is it possible to visualize reserved instance utilization in the AWS Cost Explorer?
Yes, AWS Cost Explorer provides a Reserved Instance Reports section where you can view reports about your Reserved Instances’ utilization and coverage.
How can the AWS Cost and Usage Report be delivered?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report can be delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify and can also be updated to Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift for further analysis.
Can AWS Budgets provide predictive alerts on cost overruns?
Yes, AWS Budgets provide both actual and forecasted budget alerts. If it predicts that your costs are likely to exceed your budget, AWS Budgets sends a forecast alert.
Does AWS Cost Explorer allow grouping and filtering of data?
Yes, AWS Cost Explorer provides a wide range of dimensions and filters that enable you to group and filter your cost and usage data to fit your needs.
What role does AWS Cost and Usage Report play in data transfer cost analysis?
AWS Cost and Usage Report provides details about data transfer costs, including inter-region and internet data transfers. This can help in identifying cost-saving opportunities and optimizing data transfer costs.
Can AWS Budgets alert different people based on different types of alerts?
Yes, AWS Budgets allows you to customize who gets alerted based on the type of alert. This can be particularly useful in larger organizations where different departments or teams may be responsible for different costs.
Is it possible to download and export data from AWS Cost Explorer?
Yes, AWS Cost Explorer allows you to download and export your cost and usage data to a .csv file for further offline analysis.
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