Summary
In this chapter, we explored the features and capabilities of Cost Explorer. The service allows you to baseline your AWS expenditure, allowing you to set budgets, forecast, and find anomalies. These data points assist you with knowing your spending patterns, which is necessary when planning to reduce waste.
We saw how the CUR provides a comprehensive and granular level of understanding of your entire organization. The CUR has the data you need to cover the who, what, and when related to your AWS spending. We saw how the CUR can be integrated with Athena, Redshift, and QuickSight to help you mine that data for insights.
Finally, we learned how CloudWatch adds another layer of cost visibility, especially when combined with infrastructure and application monitoring.
With greater knowledge of our AWS inventory, we now can proceed to the next step of governing and controlling our usage to keep our costs in line with budgets.