AWS Cost And Usage Report: Get Most Out Of Your AWS Investment 

Unsure about how much you are spending on AWS services and resources? Don't worry! With AWS Cost and Usage Reports, you can gain complete visibility into your AWS bills. It exactly reveals your AWS service & resource expenses and their usage. But how do these reports gather insights? What exact information do these reports offer? How will these insights help? We'll explore everything in detail in this article.

Organizations opt for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address their various needs (from storage to cloud operations). And as they grow, they often add more AWS services and resources to ensure their operations run smoothly without interruption. However, with this expansion and increased adoption of AWS comes the challenge of managing AWS expenses. But what makes this particularly challenging is managing multiple services in use and also tracking where and how money is being spent. This lack of visibility can lead to unnecessary expenditures on unused resources, placing a significant financial strain on the organization. 

Fortunately, this problem can be solved with the right tool, i.e., AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). But what is CUR? How does it work? What are its benefits? Let's find out.

What Is the AWS Cost And Usage Report?

AWS Cost and Usage Reports, also commonly known as CURs, are detailed reports that break down all the costs and usage associated with AWS services, resources, and storage. The main purpose of these reports is to help organizations see and understand exactly how they spend money (aka spending pattern) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This visibility allows them to make better decisions regarding using their cloud resources and optimizing their cloud costs. 

Also, CURs act as a single source of truth for billing, which further helps you analyze your cloud usage and expenditures.

In addition, AWS Cost and Usage Reports offer additional features that can be extremely beneficial. The next section lists some of these features.

Key Features Of AWS Cost And Usage Reports

Following are some of the key capabilities of AWS Cost and Usage Reports:

1. Customizable CSV Reports 

You can change the setting of AWS Cost and Usage Reports and save them as CSV (comma-separated values, a file format to store tabular data) reports files in the Amazon s3 storage bucket. This makes it easy to access and manage your cloud billing data.

2. Gives You The Flexibility To Make Frequent Updates/Changes

These reports can be updated up to 3 times per day. This helps ensure you always have the most current data on your cloud spend.

3. Categories Cost Details According To Different Timeframes

You can view cost details by the hours, day, or even month. This makes it easier to analyze your spending trends over different periods.

4. Creates A Detailed Cost Segmentation

These reports also break down costs by various categories, such as cloud resources, services, and custom tags (that you define). This segmentation helps you understand exactly where and how you're spending.

5. Seamlessly Integrates With Analytics Tools

AWS Cost and Usage Reports can be easily integrated with analytics tools like Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift. These tools give you the advantage of performing data analysis and creating visual reports, providing much deeper insights into your cloud usage and expenses. 

But how do these reports exactly work? How do they gather data?

How Does AWS Cost And Usage Report Work?

AWS tracks and records every interaction with its services and collects detailed metadata and usage metrics in real-time. This data is then organized based on usage time, providing detailed summaries by hour, day, or month. 

Also, if users tag their resources, AWS includes this tagging data in the reports. Then, all this data is compiled into reports in CSV format, which users can customize to include specific data, such as particular services, accounts, or time frames. 

After that, these AWS Cost and Usage Reports are delivered to a user-specified Amazon S3 bucket (where they are stored for up to 15 months). This detailed current and historical view allows users to review and analyze past usage and costs, which further helps them better manage and optimize cloud resources and spending.

Now that you are familiar with AWS Cost and Usage Reports and how it works, let's proceed further and understand the advantages of using AWS CURs.

Benefits Of  Using AWS Cost And Usage Reports

Here are some advantages of using AWS Cost and Usage Reports:

1. Provides A Detailed View Of Costs And Usage

AWS Cost and Usage Reports provide detailed cost and usage insights associated with your Amazon services. This in-depth information further helps in effective budgeting and financial planning. But how does CUR break down these details?

• Creates Tags For Costs Allocated To Different Resources

AWS CURs has a feature that automatically adds tags to each resource (these tags can even be customized according to your needs). Resource tagging further helps in accurately identifying which resources incur what expenses.

• Thoroughly Categorizes Cost 

Cost Categories in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) enhance your ability to organize and analyze cost data by adding extra columns to your reports. These columns allow you to categorize charges based on custom rules, such as projects, teams, environments, or resource creation sources. 

This added layer of data organization makes it easier to manage costs and identify spending patterns, which in turn helps in making informed financial decisions. By using Cost Categories, you can gain deeper insights into your spending habits, optimize resource usage, and improve overall financial management.

2. Helps Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities

With AWS Cost and Usage Reports, identifying cost-saving opportunities becomes much easier. You can analyze the detailed insights provided by the report to find out where exactly you are spending excessive money, and accordingly, you can make cost-saving decisions.

For example, by looking at AWS Cost and Usage Reports, you can find out how often your EC2 instances are used and when they are idle. These insights can help you decide whether buying reserved instances (which offer discounts for long-term use) or changing your current setup would be better to save money.

CURs also show you which data transfers cost the most, so you can switch to cheaper options like AWS Direct Connect to reduce expenses.

In short, CURs provide in-depth insights into resource usage. This helps uncover overprovisioned resources, and accordingly, you can adjust (reduce/eliminate) them or opt for more cost-effective services to save up on cloud expenses.

Now that you know the benefits, let's look at the use cases of AWS Cost and Usage Reports.

Use Cases Of AWS Cost And Usage Report 

Here are some use cases of AWS Cost and Usage Reports:

• Use Case 1: Ideal for organizations requiring long-term cost data retention and historical trend analysis

Organizations usually leverage AWS Cost Explorer to gain insights into historical AWS services' spending trends. It provides up to 12 months of past data sorted by services. However, Cost Explorer only offers a general overview of your costs, which may not be detailed enough for thorough analysis. 

So, for more in-depth insights, organizations can use AWS Cost and Usage Reports. These reports break down costs at the resource level, such as specific DynamoDB tables, offering a more granular view of expenses. Additionally, CUR files are stored in Amazon S3, allowing you to keep full cost history. This feature helps with long-term analysis and provides deeper insights into resource-specific spending, making it easier to track and manage costs over time.

• Use Case 2: Suitable for organizations who are already  on contract with AWS for AWS Savings Plan 

Organizations using the AWS Savings Plan can benefit from AWS Cost and Usage Reports. CUR provides detailed columns showing your savings plan rate and effective cost. This insight helps you monitor how well you use your savings plan, allowing you to make informed decisions based on accurate usage data. 

After going through the benefits and use cases of AWS Cost and Usage Reports, you may wonder how to create them. To clarify this, we've outlined the steps to create them.

Steps To Create An AWS Cost & Usage Report

To create an AWS Cost and Usage Report, follow these steps:

Step 1: Sign In—Access the AWS Billing Console and log in to the Billing and Cost Management interface.

Step 2: Navigate—From the navigation bar, select "Cost & Usage Reports."

Step 3: Create Report—Click "Create a report."

Step 4: Name Report—In the "Report name" field, enter a name for your report.

Step 5: Include Resource IDs—Under "Additional report information," select "Include resource IDs" to include individual resource IDs in the report. 

• Note that including resource IDs will create separate line items for each resource, which may significantly increase the size of your report files depending on your AWS usage.

Step 6: Data Refresh Options—Choose whether you want the reports to refresh if AWS provides refunds, credits, or support costs after your bill is finalized. When a report is refreshed, a new version is uploaded to Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service).

Step 7: Configure S3 Bucket—Click "Configure" for the S3 bucket. In the "Configure S3 Bucket" dialog box, either select an existing bucket from the drop-down menu and click "Next," or enter a bucket name and choose the Region to create a new bucket, then click "Next."

Step 8: Review Bucket Policy—Check the bucket policy to ensure it is correct, then click "Save."

Step 9: Report Path Prefix—Enter a prefix for the report path in the "Report path prefix" field.

Step 10: Time Granularity—Select the desired time granularity for your report:

• Hourly Usage: Group line items by hour.
• Daily Usage: Group line items by day.
• Monthly Usage: Group line items by month.

Step 11: Report Versioning—Choose whether to overwrite each report version or keep previous report versions along with the new one. 

• Note: Overwriting can save on Amazon S3 storage costs; meanwhile, keeping all versions can help with auditing or reviewing billing data over time.

Step 12: Review and Complete—After reviewing your report options, click "Review and Complete."

These are the steps to create AWS Cost and Usage Reports. However, to see when your reports were last updated, you can simply go to the "Cost & Usage Reports" section of your Billing and Cost Management panel.

In addition to understanding the costs and usage of AWS services, it's also important to monitor how much storage space those services use. But why? These AWS services store data in the cloud storage, and if this storage is overprovisioned/overused or not managed properly, it can easily become a source of your budget leakage. So what can be done? In this situation, advanced solutions like Lucidity can be of great help. What is Lucidity? How will it be helpful? Let's find out.

Gain Visibility Into Your Hidden Storage Expenses With Lucidity

Lucidity has introduced a storage audit solution designed to automatically perform an in-depth evaluation of your current block storage usage. How will this analysis be helpful? With this evaluation, you will gain a complete understanding of idle volumes, over-provisioned storage, hidden storage expenses, and risks of potential downtime. Further, with the help of this granular visibility, Lucidity helps you eliminate unnecessary disk storage and reduce your cloud storage costs by nearly 70%.

To help you understand better how it works, we’ve outlined its key functionalities.

• Gathers Detailed Block Storage Insights 

It leverages simple, ready-to-use executable tools to collect accurate data on your storage usage and disk sizes. With these precise insights, you can optimize your cloud storage costs and lower expenses. 

• Generates Curated Reports & Logs Associate With Storage

Apart from that, Lucidity also keeps a record of disk spend, disk usage, and more in the form of detailed reports and logs stored in directories. Further, you can review and analyze these reports later (in the near future) when needed. Also, these reports and logs can help you stay on top of your storage needs and quickly address any uncertain issues that arise.

• Highlights Potential Risks Of Downtime

Along with the above-advanced features, Lucidity also offers a disk downtime risks feature that highlights potential downtime risks. This feature enables you to take proactive measures to ensure the reliability and availability of your storage infrastructure. This further enhances operational efficiency and mitigates risks associated with storage-related disruptions.

To learn more about Lucidity's storage audit, book a demo now.

Effectively Manage Your AWS Expenses With AWS Cost And Usage Report

In conclusion, the AWS cost and usage report can significantly enhance your ability to manage and optimize your AWS spending. It provides detailed insights into your cost and usage, making it easier to identify unnecessary expenses and resource consumption. This further helps ensure that every dollar spent contributes to your organization's growth rather than being wasted on unnecessary services or resources. 

However, don't limit yourself to evaluating and understanding AWS's cost and usage. You need to dig deeper into storage costs and thoroughly analyze them. Unmanaged cloud storage can quickly lead to budget leakage. To have control over storage costs, you can use solutions like Lucidity. 

Moreover, regardless of your cloud services, it is always important to have complete visibility into your cloud setup. This helps you save money and plan better for your future business growth.