What is Amazon Cost Management?
Welcome to the Amazon Cost Management User Guide.
The Amazon Cost Management console has features that you can use for budgeting and forecasting costs and methods for you to optimize your pricing to reduce your overall Amazon bill.
The Amazon Cost Management console is integrated closely with the Billing console. Using both together, you can manage your costs in a holistic manner. You can use Billing console resources to manage your ongoing payments, and Amazon Cost Management console resources to optimize your future costs. For information about Amazon resources to understand, pay, or organize your Amazon bills, see the Amazon Billing User Guide.
With the Amazon Cost Management console and the Billing console, you can do the following tasks.
| Use cases | Description | Amazon Cost Management feature names | Billing console feature names |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organize | Construct your cost allocation and governance foundation with your own tagging strategy. | - | |
|
Report |
Raise awareness and accountability of your cloud spend with the detailed, allocable cost data. | ||
| Access | Track billing information across the organization in a consolidated view. | - | |
| Forecast | Estimate your resource utilization and spend with forecast dashboards that you create. | - | |
| Budget | Keep your spend in check with custom budget threshold and auto alert notification. | - | |
| Purchase | Use free trials and programmatic discounts based on your workload pattern and needs. | ||
| Rightsize | Align your service allocation size to your actual workload demand. | - | |
| Inspect | Stay up to date with your resource deployment and cost optimization opportunities. | - |
Features of Amazon Cost Management
- Amazon Cost Explorer
-
Use case: Report, Forecast, Inspect
Amazon Cost Explorer is a feature that you can use to visualize your cost data for further analysis. Using it, you can filter graphs by several different values. This includes Availability Zone, Amazon service, and Amazon Region, It also includes other specifics such as custom cost allocation tag, Amazon EC2 instance type, and purchase option. If you use consolidated billing, you can also filter by member account. In addition, you can see a forecast of future costs based on your historical cost data.
Documentation: Analyzing your costs with Amazon Cost Explorer
- Amazon Budgets
-
Use case: Forecast, Inspect
Amazon Budgets tracks your Amazon usage and costs. Amazon Budgets uses the cost visualization that's provided by Amazon Cost Explorer to show the status of your budgets. This provides forecasts of your estimated costs and tracks your Amazon usage, including your Amazon Free Tier usage. You can also use Amazon Budgets to create Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications for when you exceed your budgeted amounts, or when your estimated costs exceed your budgets.
Documentation: Managing your costs with Amazon Budgets
- Rightsizing Recommendations
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Use case: Control
Rightsizing recommendations is a feature that reviews your historical Amazon EC2 usage for the past 14 days to identify opportunities for greater cost and usage efficiency. The feature identifies cost saving opportunities by downsizing or terminating instances in Amazon EC2.
Documentation: Accessing Reserved Instance Recommendations
- Savings Plans
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Use case: Purchase
Savings Plans offers a flexible pricing model that provides savings on Amazon usage. Savings Plans provide savings beyond On-Demand rates in exchange for a commitment of using a specified amount of compute power (measured every hour) for a one or three year period. You can manage your plans by using recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts in Amazon Cost Explorer.
Documentation: What is Savings Plans
- Savings Plans
-
Use case: Cost estimation
If you want to see the costs associated with Savings Plans before making a purchase decision, you can use the Amazon Price List Bulk API.
Documentation: Using the Amazon Price List Bulk API