Cost Explorer is the tool for visualizing and analyzing your AWS spending over time. You can break costs down by service, account, or tag, and forecast future spend.
Cost Explorer vs Budgets
Cost Explorer is for analyzing and visualizing past and forecasted costs. Budgets is for setting a limit and getting alerted when you approach or exceed it. Analyze where money went → Cost Explorer; get warned before overspending → Budgets.
Test yourself
A finance team wants to visualize the last six months of AWS spend broken down by service to find savings. Which tool?
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- Amazon CloudWatch
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Cost Explorer visualizes and analyzes historical and forecasted spend, broken down by service, account, or tag. Budgets (A) sets alerts on thresholds; Trusted Advisor (C) gives best-practice checks; CloudWatch (D) monitors performance.
Related topics
AWS Budgets · AWS Pricing & Free Tier · AWS Trusted Advisor
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