If someone asked you how to look up how much an AWS service is costing you this
month, would you know how to find that answer?
What if you needed your forecasted costs for this month? No worries.
I'll show you how to do this now. Like, right now.
I am signed into my AWS management console and I'm going to search for billing
on the left side. I'm going to click on Cost Explorer,
and then I'm going to click on launch Cost Explorer.
Now the home dashboard gives us some information - current month costs,
forecasted month-end costs, trends,
and then some recently accessed reports.
Since we want to dial in a little deeper,
on the left side we're going to click Cost Explorer. By default,
it's going to show us the last six months, monthly, grouped by service,
in a bar chart.
And then we can see the same information that is displayed in this bar
chart down here in table format.
What I'm going to do is set it to show us the last seven days,
grouped by daily. So you can see our chart has changed to daily.
Hold on, last seven days, hit apply. There we go.
We see we have January 29th through the 4th
and we are grouped by service. But if I remove them,
you can just see our total costs.
And it's just one color because there's no 'group by' filter on.
But let's say we want to see EC2-Other, and then hit apply.
Oh, let's add one more in there. EC2-Instances.
And then we're going to group by service. Now we see in purple,
we have EC2-Other and in teal, we have EC2-Instances.
It doesn't look like we've consumed anything from our instances,
but you can see down here,
the table has also updated to reflect that information.
You see January 29th through the 4th, all down here.
You can really dial into the filters and apply anything to get into the
nitty gritty of the cost information that you'd like to get to. Let's,
for example, set a region.
So what we're taking a look at now is the last seven days, daily,
grouped by service,
whow us the costs that have been used by the
EC2 instances and EC2 other in US-East-Ohio.
You have that information in here.
So what if this information is something that you like to take a look at often?
You can actually save this as a report.
We'll call this "ec2 7 daily us
east:, and then we're going to hit save.
Fantastic. On the left side, we can hit reports.
And then we see that newly created report is in here,
and here.
We also have a couple of built-in reports that are provided to us by AWS.
And we also have the option to manage reports. If I select this one,
I can delete it from here or duplicate it.
Now I'm going to click into one of these.
I'm going to hit "Monthly EC2 running hours costs and usage:.
And you can see that this report is pretty much what we've played around with
before except set to a different usage type group.
So it's applying a different filter. Now,
what if you wanted to provide this information to someone who doesn't have
access to AWS? Sure, you could create an account and all that kind of stuff,
but if they just need this info, you can actually download the CSV.
And then let's open that up.
And now we'll see that this table matches that same exact information that is
down here. You see here,
this is pretty handy. Again,
we don't have to create an account for people to be able to see this
information. We can just provide them the CSV. And that's it!
We've explored Cost Explorer a bit and know that it's a tool that we can use to
get granular details and what our resources are costing us.
Knowing how to use this alongside budgets and cost alarms are the cost
management tools we need to make better informed financial decisions when it
comes to our AWS environment. Alrighty Cloud Gurus,
that's it for this episode of ACG Fundamentals.
Let us know how your exploration of Cost Explorer went in the comments.
Don't forget to like and subscribe for more cloud content.
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus, I'll see you in the next one.