AWS cost and usage monitoring tools (for example, Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, AWS Pricing Calculator)

Can you explain what AWS Cost Explorer is and how it can help in cost management?

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that allows users to visualize and understand their AWS spending over time. It helps in cost management by providing detailed insights into your AWS costs and usage patterns. With Cost Explorer, you can view data up to the last 12 months to forecast future expenses, identify trends, and pinpoint potential cost savings through filterable graphs and a comprehensive set of data analytics tools.

Describe what AWS Trusted Advisor is and how it contributes to cost optimization.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. For cost optimization, Trusted Advisor offers actionable recommendations that can help reduce excess spend, such as identifying idle or under-utilized resources and suggesting changes to more cost-effective service configurations or reservation purchasing.

Explain the features of the AWS Pricing Calculator and how it aids in planning and cost control.

The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. It helps in planning and cost control by allowing you to model your solutions before building them, providing detailed cost estimates that factor in region, usage, and customized configurations. This predictive planning can help avoid unexpected charges and manage the budget.

How does the AWS Cost Explorer Reserved Instance (RI) Utilization report assist with cost savings?

The AWS Cost Explorer RI Utilization report helps users maximize their investments in Reserved Instances. It provides detailed information about your RI usage and identifies under-utilized RIs, allowing you to make adjustments to increase utilization and make the most of the discounts offered by RI pricing.

What is the purpose of AWS Budgets, and how does it integrate with cost monitoring?

AWS Budgets allows users to set custom budgets to monitor their spending and usage. It works in conjunction with cost monitoring by enabling the creation of budget alerts that notify users when they are at risk of exceeding their defined cost constraints. This proactive approach helps in managing expenses and maintaining control over the AWS costs.

Can you describe a real-world scenario where you would recommend using AWS Cost Anomaly Detection?

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is used to identify unusual spending patterns that could indicate misconfigurations or unintended usage. A real-world scenario where this would be useful is when there is a sudden, unexplained increase in the bill, possibly due to a spike in traffic or deployment of resources in a more expensive region or a configuration change that led to a service running on a more costly scale.

Explain briefly what AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) are and how they could be utilized by a large enterprise?

AWS Cost and Usage Reports are detailed spreadsheets that give insights into your AWS spending and resource usage. For a large enterprise, CUR can integrate with their own analytics tools or be compatible with third-party analytics services to provide granular data that can be used for internal chargebacks, detailed cost analysis, and advanced cost management strategies.

How do you leverage the AWS Trusted Advisor “Service Limits” checks for cost optimization?

The “Service Limits” checks in AWS Trusted Advisor help monitor usage against the service limits of AWS accounts. Leveraging this check helps to ensure that you are not incurring unnecessary costs for exceeding limits and also alerts you to scale your service or request an increase in service limits before it affects your operations or incurs additional expenses related to limit breaches.

Discuss a situation in which you would switch from using AWS Cost Explorer to a third-party cost management tool?

You might switch to a third-party cost management tool if your organization requires more complex cost allocation methodologies, such as shared cost distributions, that AWS Cost Explorer does not support, or if there’s a need for integrating cost data with other non-AWS financial systems to provide a unified view of organizational spending across multiple clouds or IT services.

What role does the AWS Free Tier play in cost management, and how should it be monitored?

The AWS Free Tier provides limited quantities of certain AWS services at no cost, which is useful for cost management, especially for experimentation and low-volume workloads. It should be monitored to ensure that you stay within the free tier limits and to understand when a service is transitioning to a paid tier so that you can adjust usage accordingly to avoid unexpected charges.

Explain how purchase options like Savings Plans or Reserved Instances impact AWS cost tracking and reporting.

Purchase options like Savings Plans or Reserved Instances provide discounted rates in exchange for a commitment to a certain level of usage. When using these options, AWS cost tracking and reporting will show both the actual usage and associated costs, as well as how much is covered by these commitments, allowing businesses to understand their savings and ensuring they are on track with their usage commitment to maximize the benefits.

Describe a situation where you would use the AWS Pricing Calculator in conjunction with another AWS cost management tool to optimize costs.

The AWS Pricing Calculator could be used at the planning stage to estimate the costs of an architecture design and then combined with AWS Budgets to monitor actual spending against this forecast. If actual spending deviates from the projected budget, you could use tools like AWS Cost Explorer to delve into the details of your spending to identify opportunities for cost optimization.