Tutorial / Cram Notes

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed predefined thresholds. Budgets can be set up on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, and they support filtering based on services, linked accounts, tags, and more. Budgets can also be action-oriented, triggering specific responses when a budget is breached.

Example Usage: You can create a budget to track the monthly cost of your EC2 instances. If the costs exceed your threshold, AWS Budgets can notify you via email or SMS.

AWS Cost Explorer

Cost Explorer is a tool that allows users to visualize and manage AWS spending. The service provides an easy-to-use interface with detailed reports that break down AWS costs by services, linked accounts, and time periods. With Cost Explorer, you can identify cost trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and forecast future spending.

Example Usage: You can use Cost Explorer to generate a report that shows the trends of your S3 storage costs over the last six months, facilitating analyses of data transfer and storage optimization opportunities.

AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)

The AWS Cost and Usage Report contains the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available on AWS, including additional metadata about AWS services, pricing, and reservations. The CUR allows you to dive deeply into your AWS costs and usage, either by using AWS-provided analysis tools or by integrating the data with your own analytics tools.

Example Usage: If you need detailed insights into your Reserved Instance utilization, you can use the CUR to get specific data on your RI coverage and potential savings opportunities.

Reserved Instance Reporting

For workloads with predictable, consistent usage, Reserved Instances (RIs) can provide significant savings over on-demand pricing. AWS provides specific RI reports that help you track your RI inventory and usage. These reports give insights into RI utilization and help identify underutilized or idle RIs so you can make cost-effective decisions.

Example Usage: You can analyze your RI reports to identify any instances that are frequently underutilized and consider selling them on the Reserved Instance Marketplace to reduce waste.

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Among the various checks Trusted Advisor performs, cost optimization checks can help you identify areas to save, such as idle or underutilized resources.

Example Usage: Trusted Advisor might highlight unattached Elastic IP Addresses that are incurring charges and thus could be released to save costs.

AWS Cost Categories

Cost Categories allow you to map your cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on needs, such as organizational structure or service type. This feature can help Solutions Architects to allocate costs more accurately to different departments or projects.

Example Usage: If your organization has multiple departments, you can create cost categories to allocate the AWS charges specific to each department based on the tags attached to the resources they use.

AWS Organizations and Consolidated Billing

AWS Organizations helps you centrally manage and govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources. With Consolidated Billing, you can consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts, providing an overall view of costs and simplifying the chargeback process to individual departments or projects.

Example Usage: By consolidating billing, you can take advantage of volume discounts since AWS will aggregate usage across all accounts to determine the bulk pricing tiers.

AWS Pricing Calculator

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that allows you to estimate the cost for your AWS services before you deploy them. Using the calculator, you can make informed decisions about the services you choose and their configurations to optimize costs.

Example Usage: You can model the monthly costs of a high-availability architecture spanning multiple AZs and regions to understand the financial impact before deployment.

For Solutions Architects preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam, knowing how to use these cost and usage monitoring tools effectively is part of the essential knowledge required to design, manage, and operate cost-effective and scalable systems on AWS. Understanding how to leverage these tools not only helps in passing the certification but also in real-world scenarios where cost optimization is a continuous concern for businesses.

Practice Test with Explanation

True or False: AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize your spending patterns over time.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: A) True

Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

Which AWS service provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices?

  • A) AWS Trusted Advisor
  • B) AWS Cost Explorer
  • C) AWS Budgets
  • D) AWS CloudTrail

Answer: A) AWS Trusted Advisor

Explanation: AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance.

True or False: AWS Budgets can send alerts when your costs or usage exceed predefined threshold amounts.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: A) True

Explanation: AWS Budgets can alert you when your costs or usage are forecasted to exceed your budgeted amount, providing real-time monitoring of your expenses.

Which AWS service helps you to categorize and track your AWS spending and usage by cost allocation tags?

  • A) AWS Cost and Usage Report
  • B) AWS Price List API
  • C) Amazon CloudWatch
  • D) AWS Billing Dashboard

Answer: A) AWS Cost and Usage Report

Explanation: AWS Cost and Usage Report allows you to track your AWS spending and usage by cost allocation tags that you have activated.

True or False: With AWS Budgets, you can set custom budget time periods like weekly or bi-weekly budgets.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: B) False

Explanation: AWS Budgets allows you to set daily, monthly, quarterly, or yearly budgets, but it doesn’t support custom time periods like weekly or bi-weekly.

Which of the following AWS services provides detailed billing reports with an account’s costs and usage?

  • A) Amazon QuickSight
  • B) AWS Cost Explorer
  • C) AWS Cost and Usage Report
  • D) AWS Billing Dashboard

Answer: C) AWS Cost and Usage Report

Explanation: AWS Cost and Usage Report tracks your AWS usage and provides detailed billing data that helps you understand your costs.

True or False: Amazon CloudWatch can be used to monitor and track AWS service costs.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: B) False

Explanation: Amazon CloudWatch is primarily focused on performance monitoring and operational health of AWS services, not cost tracking.

Which feature of Amazon CloudWatch allows you to receive notifications for specific events or thresholds?

  • A) Alarms
  • B) Logs
  • C) Insights
  • D) Events

Answer: A) Alarms

Explanation: Amazon CloudWatch Alarms can be set on various metrics to send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources being monitored when a threshold is breached.

True or False: The AWS Price List API provides access to the pricing of AWS services programmatically.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: A) True

Explanation: The AWS Price List API allows you to access the prices of AWS services programmatically, which is useful for cost estimation and analysis.

Which AWS service can be used to aggregate and analyze cost and usage data across multiple accounts?

  • A) AWS Organizations
  • B) AWS Cost Explorer
  • C) AWS Control Tower
  • D) AWS Cost and Usage Report

Answer: A) AWS Organizations

Explanation: AWS Organizations allows you to aggregate and analyze cost and usage data across multiple accounts within a single consolidated bill.

True or False: AWS CloudTrail provides a history of AWS API calls, which can be used for cost allocation and understanding user activity, but not for real-time monitoring.

  • A) True
  • B) False

Answer: A) True

Explanation: AWS CloudTrail provides a history of AWS API calls for your account, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services, which can be used for audit and review purposes.

AWS recommends using which of the following tools for cost optimization before launching a new workload?

  • A) AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
  • B) AWS Cost Explorer
  • C) AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
  • D) AWS Pricing Calculator

Answer: D) AWS Pricing Calculator

Explanation: AWS Pricing Calculator helps you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS before launching a new workload.

Interview Questions

What AWS service would you use to receive detailed cost and usage reports and how can it be accessed?

AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the service you would use to access detailed cost and usage reports. It can be accessed through the AWS Management Console by enabling it in the Billing and Cost Management dashboard. Once set up, the reports can be delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice, and can be further analyzed using AWS Cost Explorer, Amazon Athena, or Amazon QuickSight.

How does AWS Budgets help with cost management and monitoring?

AWS Budgets allow you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage from the AWS services. You can create budgets to monitor actual costs and forecasted costs, or even usage metrics, so that you can proactively manage your spending. Additionally, AWS Budgets can send alerts when your costs or usage exceed or are forecasted to exceed your budgeted amount.

What is AWS Cost Explorer, and how does it help in analyzing your AWS costs?

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. With Cost Explorer, you can create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data, both at a high level (e.g., overall spend by service) and for more granular insights (e.g., spend by individual EC2 instances). It helps in identifying trends, pinpointing cost drivers, and detecting anomalies in your spending.

Can you explain the role of AWS Organizations in cost monitoring?

AWS Organizations plays a key role in cost monitoring for enterprises by allowing them to consolidate billing across multiple AWS accounts. This centralized billing feature enables companies to see the combined cost and usage across all accounts and access volume discounts. Furthermore, AWS Organizations can implement Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce certain cost-related policies across the entire organization, such as restrictions on using expensive services or resources.

Describe how Amazon CloudWatch can assist with AWS cost and usage monitoring.

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring and operational data for AWS resources and applications. With CloudWatch, you can collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. For cost and usage monitoring, CloudWatch can be used to track spend by setting up billing alerts that notify you when your account billing crosses a defined threshold.

What functionalities does the AWS Trusted Advisor have in relation to cost optimization?

AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following best practices. In terms of cost optimization, Trusted Advisor checks your AWS environment and provides recommendations that can potentially save money by identifying idle and underutilized resources, and suggesting less expensive resource options.

How can AWS Savings Plans help to reduce costs while using AWS resources?

AWS Savings Plans offer significant savings on specified usage in exchange for committing to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year period. Customers have the flexibility to choose between Compute Savings Plans, which apply to any EC2 instance regardless of region, instance family, operating system, or tenure, and EC2 Instance Savings Plans, which provide the highest savings but apply to a specific instance family within a region.

What is Amazon QuickSight, and how can it be applied to AWS cost and usage data?

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization. It can be used to visualize AWS cost and usage data by importing this information into QuickSight from AWS services such as AWS Cost and Usage Report or Amazon S Users can then create interactive dashboards and perform ad hoc analysis to better understand and optimize their AWS spending.

In what ways does AWS Tagging help with cost allocation and monitoring?

AWS Tagging allows you to add metadata tags to your AWS resources, which then enables you to organize and identify cost allocation for resources more effectively. By implementing a consistent tagging strategy, you can track costs at a granular level, categorizing costs by departments, projects, or environments. This helps in cost reporting, resource management, and facilitates more accurate cost monitoring and budgeting.

How can AWS Cost Anomaly Detection support effective cost management?

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to monitor your AWS spending patterns and detect unusual or unexpected cost increases. By setting up cost anomaly monitors, it can alert you to anomalies as they occur, enabling you to quickly identify and respond to unintended spend. This feature helps in taking corrective actions before costs become drastically high.

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Elmer Warren
5 months ago

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) has been a lifesaver for managing our expenses. Any tips on best practices for setting it up?

Katiane da Paz
7 months ago

Thanks for discussing the AWS Cost Explorer tool. It’s been quite useful in visualizing our costs across different services.

بردیا کوتی
7 months ago

I appreciate the breakdown of AWS Budgets. Setting thresholds and alerts has made a huge difference in avoiding surprise bills.

Đuro Jevtić
6 months ago

How accurate do you find the forecasting feature in AWS Cost Explorer?

Sapna Gupta
7 months ago

Great post, very informative!

Tristan Gauthier
6 months ago

For anyone using AWS Trusted Advisor, are the cost optimization recommendations usually helpful?

Etiënne Bruinewoud
6 months ago

What are your thoughts on using third-party tools like CloudHealth for cost management?

Cassiana Almeida
7 months ago

Has anyone used the AWS Free Tier usage alerts? Do they work well?

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