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
Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
From the Blog
Cloud Cost Optimization: Where the Bill Actually Comes From
A cloud bill breaks into four families of charge: compute, storage, data transfer and managed services. Optimising without knowing which family dominates wastes effort on the wrong line. This guide shows how to decompose a bill, which lever fits each family, and how to make the reductions stick rather than regrow within a quarter.
Read More Cloud & CybersecurityHow to build a cloud cost allocation tagging strategy
Make your bill answer "who owns this": choosing a minimal mandatory tag set, enforcing it at creation, handling untaggable spend and reporting per team.
Read More Cloud & CybersecurityWhat Is Auto Scaling in the Cloud
Auto scaling automatically adds or removes cloud servers based on demand, keeping apps responsive during spikes and cutting cost when traffic is low.
Read More Cloud & CybersecurityNetwork Topology Explained: Star, Bus, Ring, and Mesh
Network topology is the physical or logical arrangement of devices and connections in a network, and it determines a network's speed, cost, and fault tolerance. This guide compares star, bus, ring, mesh, and hybrid topologies with real trade-offs.
Read More