Which service is most appropriate for analyzing AWS charges by service and identifying which services are driving costs?

Explanation

AWS Cost Explorer is a service that visualizes and analyzes AWS charges and usage by service, time period, and other dimensions.

Per-choice explanations

Practical Use

AWS Cost Explorer is a cost management service that visualizes and analyzes AWS charges and usage by service, time period, account, tag, and other dimensions. You can review up to 12 months of historical data as charts and tables, and view a forecast for up to 12 months ahead. You can also view coverage and utilization analysis for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans from the same console. On the exam, the typical question asks which service to use to analyze AWS charges by service and identify which services are driving costs, with Cost Explorer as the correct answer. Distractors include Amazon CloudFront (CDN), AWS IAM (authentication and authorization), and Amazon VPC (network). All of these are unrelated to cost analysis, so as long as you understand the scope of each service, you can rule them out. In practice, Cost Explorer is used together with AWS Budgets. Cost Explorer is for analyzing past and current costs, while AWS Budgets is for alerting when a predefined threshold is crossed. On CLF-C02, the division of roles between these two services, and the distinction from AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), which exports detailed line items to Amazon S3, are common topics. Remember that Cost Explorer is for analysis and visualization, Budgets is for notifications, and CUR is for exporting detailed line items, and the three services are easy to keep separate.