Obtaining Data for Understanding Your AWS Bill

Here are some AWS services/resources that you can use to gain a deeper understanding, instead of just that one bottom line figure.

Just like we always check our receipt when we leave the supermarket, it is a good practice to check in-depth our AWS bill every month as well.

• AWS Cost and Usage Reports. These are detailed reports that AWS creates 2–3 times per day and are stored in an S3 bucket that you define. Data can be as granular as 1 hour and they have all the relevant usage information you’ll need. The downside is that these reports can easily turn into many thousands of records, therefore you need to have a scalable way to analyze them. To start off, you may use Excel to do some basis analysis, though later on you may want to move to AWS Athena to analyze more efficiently and thoroughly.

• AWS Cost Explorer. This is a graphical interface in the AWS console that allows you to visualize relevant items that contribute to your AWS cost, such as top services, usage types, API operations and others. It is good for very basic use and it is easily and readily available on the management console as a service. However to go one step further, querying Cost and Usage reports can be a much more effective way to find key areas that contribute to AWS cost. For example for our analysis with customers, we dive layers deeper into services, categories and sub-categories, all contributing to a meaningful and complete picture of where we are spending our money on. This is an essential step for getting to the bottom of many cost-related issues.

• CloudWatch Metrics. Once the top resources by cost are identified, sometimes it’s necessary to look at the actual system metrics for specific AWS components. That’s where a service like CloudWatch is essential in order to identify areas for cost optimizations, such as idle or under-utilized resources. CloudWatch is also important when making informed cost optimization decisions that could potentially affect performance or availability. While CloudWatch is good for what it does best, there are also third-party offerings that does exactly the same thing using observability router such as Vector or Fluentbit to route metrics and logs to the best
  (and cheapest) destination. At the end of the day, good metrics and analytics contribute to good insights for us.

• AWS Trusted Advisor. This AWS service executes periodic checks on your AWS infrastructure and comes up with a list of recommendations. There is a section for Cost Optimizations, which typically contains useful findings, such as idle or under-utilized resources, among others. Do note that in order to access these findings, you have to enable AWS Support, which has a cost depending on the plan you choose (e.g. Developer, Business or Enterprise).