AWS Cost Explorer
By Amazon Web Services
AWS Cost Explorer is a visualization and analysis tool that lets AWS customers view, filter, and forecast their spending and usage patterns over time, broken down by service, account, tag, or region.
Definition
AWS Cost Explorer is a visualization and analysis tool that lets AWS customers view, filter, and forecast their spending and usage patterns over time, broken down by service, account, tag, or region.
Overview
Cost Explorer gives AWS customers a way to answer the basic but often surprisingly hard question of where their cloud bill is going. It visualizes historical cost and usage data going back up to several years, and lets users group and filter that data by dimensions like service, linked account, region, instance type, or custom cost-allocation tags, making it possible to see, for example, exactly how much a specific team or product line is spending. Beyond historical reporting, Cost Explorer includes forecasting, which projects future spend based on past usage trends, and Savings Plans / Reserved Instance recommendations, which analyze usage patterns and suggest commitments that would reduce costs compared to on-demand pricing. Rightsizing recommendations flag over-provisioned EC2 instances that could be downsized without materially affecting performance. Cost Explorer is a foundational tool in the broader discipline of FinOps — the practice of bringing financial accountability to variable cloud spend — and is often paired with AWS Budgets (which sends alerts when spending crosses a threshold) and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (which provide the most granular, exportable billing data for custom analysis). Combined with commitment options like Reserved Instances and Spot Instances, it forms the core toolkit teams use to keep AWS spend under control.
Key Features
- Historical cost and usage visualization with flexible date ranges
- Filtering and grouping by service, account, region, instance type, or cost-allocation tag
- Spend forecasting based on historical usage trends
- Savings Plans and Reserved Instance purchase recommendations
- EC2 rightsizing recommendations for over-provisioned instances
- API access for pulling cost data into custom dashboards or reports