Optimising Your AWS Spending with AWS Cost Explorer: An Overview and Tutorial

AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful cost management tool that allows you to visualise, understand, and manage your AWS spending. With Cost Explorer, you can analyse your AWS costs and usage over time to identify trends, create custom cost reports, and receive cost alerts when your spending exceeds a set threshold. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at AWS Cost Explorer, its features, and how it can help you optimise your AWS spending.

Overview of AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a web-based tool that provides a graphical interface to help you understand your AWS costs and usage. The tool allows you to view your usage and spending data for the current month, as well as for the previous twelve months. Cost Explorer provides several predefined reports, including cost by service, cost by region, and cost by instance type. You can also create your own custom reports by selecting the metrics and filters that are most relevant to your organisation.

Cost Explorer is included with your AWS account, and there are no additional fees to use the tool. However, you may incur charges for using other AWS services that Cost Explorer depends on, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Athena.

Key Features of AWS Cost Explorer

1. Cost Reports: AWS Cost Explorer provides a set of predefined reports that allow you to view your AWS costs and usage data in different ways. These reports…