AWS Cost Explorer

An analytics service to see which AWS services are incurring charges.

A service that visualizes AWS usage charges by service, period, and tag. Used for cost analysis.

• Reviewing per-service expenses
• Reviewing monthly cost trends
• Investigating unused resources

• Used for cost visualization and analysis
• Lets you review past usage charges
• Has a different role from Budgets

• Combine with tagging to understand per-project expenses
• Serves as an entry point for considering Rightsizing or Savings Plans
• Use it to investigate causes when a budget is exceeded

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool for **visualizing and analyzing** AWS usage costs. Accessible directly from the console, it allows you to view up to 13 months of cost data by service, region, tag, and account. It also has a forecasting feature that predicts costs up to 12 months ahead. The **distinction in roles from AWS Budgets** is frequently tested. Cost Explorer is a tool for "visualizing and analyzing past and current costs" and does not have alerting or notification features. Budgets is a tool for "sending alerts against a set budget" and supports email and SNS notifications. The rule of thumb is: use Cost Explorer when you want to understand costs, and use Budgets when you want to be notified when costs are exceeded. In practice, cost analysis is often performed in combination with CloudTrail — when investigating which IAM user or role created an unexpected resource, Cost Explorer detects the cost surge, and CloudTrail provides the operational history for deeper investigation. By thoroughly enforcing tagging, cost allocation by project or environment (dev/staging/prod) becomes possible, which can also be used for chargeback between departments. CLF-C02 asks about Cost Explorer as the correct answer to "Which service analyzes costs?" or "Which one is used to view cost trends over the past 12 months?". Distractor options typically include Budgets (for notification purposes), CloudTrail (for operation logs), and CloudWatch (for performance monitoring).

• AWS Cost Explorer (AWS Official)
• What is AWS Cost Explorer (AWS Official Documentation)

Last updated: 2026-06-01