Visualizing and Analyzing Costs with AWS Cost Explorer - Tag Strategy and Savings Plans
Visualize AWS spending with cost analysis by service, account, and tag, plus ML-based anomaly detection and cost forecasting. Learn how to optimize costs using Reserved Instance and Savings Plans purchase recommendations.
Overview of Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a service for visualizing and analyzing your AWS usage costs and consumption. It lets you analyze the past 13 months of cost data across multiple dimensions including service, account, region, and tag. The ML-based cost forecasting feature predicts spending for the next 12 months, supporting budget planning. While Budgets specializes in alert-based cost management, Cost Explorer focuses on analysis and visualization. Integration with Cost Anomaly Detection automatically detects cost increases that deviate from normal patterns and helps identify root causes.
Cost Analysis and Filtering
The Cost Explorer console displays daily and monthly cost trends in graphs, with the ability to group and filter by dimensions such as service, linked account, region, instance type, and usage type. Activating cost allocation tags lets you categorize costs by custom dimensions like project, environment (dev/staging/prod), and team. Tags are activated in the Billing console, and tag-based analysis becomes available for data collected after activation. You can also use the API (GetCostAndUsage) to programmatically retrieve cost data and build custom dashboards or automated reports. A common pattern is to periodically export Cost Explorer reports to S3 and perform advanced analysis with Athena or QuickSight.
Purchase Recommendations and Savings Plans
Cost Explorer provides purchase recommendations for Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. It analyzes past usage patterns and suggests purchase plans that offer the greatest cost savings with 1-year or 3-year commitments. Savings Plans come in two types: Compute Savings Plans (applicable to EC2, Fargate, and Lambda) and EC2 Instance Savings Plans (applicable to specific instance families). Compute Savings Plans offer greater flexibility but slightly lower discount rates. Recommendations optimize from both coverage (the percentage of usage covered by RIs/SPs) and utilization (the percentage of purchased RIs/SPs actually being used). For practical guidance on AWS cost management, related books on Amazon are also a helpful reference.
Cost Explorer Pricing
The Cost Explorer console is free to use. API calls (GetCostAndUsage, GetCostForecast, etc.) are billed at approximately $0.01 per request. Cost Anomaly Detection is free, with no additional charges for receiving anomaly detection alerts. Activating cost allocation tags is free, but managing and governing tags requires organizational processes. When using Organizations consolidated billing, you can centrally analyze costs for all member accounts from the management account.
Summary
AWS Cost Explorer visualizes AWS spending through multi-dimensional cost analysis and ML-based forecasting. Combine cost allocation tags for project-level and team-level analysis, RI/Savings Plans purchase recommendations, and Cost Anomaly Detection for anomaly alerts to drive continuous cost optimization.