Cost Management Tools#
“Which tool should the company use to see/track/limit spending?” - the answer is one of a small set of billing tools. Learn what each one uniquely does.
The lineup#
| Tool | What it’s for | Scenario keyword |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Explorer | Visualize & forecast costs, RI (Reserved Instance)/SP (Savings Plan) utilization & coverage | “why did costs rise”, “should we buy RIs” |
| Cost & Usage Report (CUR) | Most granular billing data (hourly, resource-level) | “detailed analysis in Athena/QuickSight” |
| Budgets | Alert and act at thresholds | “notify me at 80% of budget”, “stop resources” |
| Cost Anomaly Detection | ML-based unusual-spend alerts | “sudden unexpected spike” |
| Pricing Calculator | Estimate costs before building | “what will this architecture cost” |
| Trusted Advisor | Best-practice checks: cost, security, performance, fault tolerance, service limits | “find idle resources, unattached EBS (Elastic Block Store)” |
| Compute Optimizer | Right-size recommendations | “is this instance too big” |
| AWS Budgets + Billing Alarms | Classic proactive control | CloudWatch alarm on estimated charges |
Details worth knowing#
- Cost Explorer: 12 months history default, forecasting up to 12 months, save custom views; RI/SP utilization reports answer “are we wasting our commitment”
- CUR is the only source with full resource-level detail → analyze with Athena, visualize with QuickSight
- Budgets can trigger actions (e.g. apply an IAM (Identity and Access Management) policy via Service Catalog to stop non-prod); alert types: actual, forecasted, and planned (RI/SP)
- Trusted Advisor full checks require Business/Enterprise support; the “cost” category finds idle ELBs (Elastic Load Balancing), unassociated Elastic IPs, low-utilization instances
- Compute Optimizer analyzes CloudWatch metrics and recommends right-sized instances (needs opt-in)
flowchart LR
usage[AWS usage] --> ce[Cost Explorer: what happened?]
usage --> cur[CUR: raw detail]
usage --> budget[Budgets: alert/act]
usage --> ta[Trusted Advisor: fix waste]
usage --> co[Compute Optimizer: right-size]Not: sinav eslesmeleri: “harcama gecmisi ve RI karari” = Cost Explorer, “en detayli veri” = CUR, “butce asiminda uyari/aksiyon” = Budgets, “bos kaynak / limit uyari” = Trusted Advisor, “instance fazla buyuk mu” = Compute Optimizer.
Exam check#
Q1: Management wants an alert when monthly spend is forecast to exceed $10,000, and wants non-production resources stopped automatically at 100% of budget. Which service?
- A) Cost Explorer
- B) AWS Budgets
- C) Trusted Advisor
- D) Cost & Usage Report
Cevabı göster
Answer: B. Forecasted-threshold alerts + budget actions = Budgets.
Q2: A finance team needs resource-level, hourly billing data to build a custom chargeback dashboard in QuickSight. What should they use?
- A) Cost Explorer
- B) AWS Budgets
- C) Cost & Usage Report analyzed with Athena
- D) CloudWatch Metrics
Cevabı göster
Answer: C. Only CUR has resource-level granularity; QuickSight visualizes it.
Ozet#
- Cost Explorer = grafik + tahmin + RI/SP kullanim raporlari
- CUR = en detayli fatura verisi (Athena + QuickSight ile)
- Budgets = limit + uyari + otomatik aksiyon
- Cost Anomaly Detection = ML ile beklenmeyen harcama
- Trusted Advisor = bos kaynak, limit, guvenlik denetimi
- Compute Optimizer = right-sizing onerileri
- Pricing Calculator = kurulmadan once maliyet tahmini