AWS CloudWatch can help you track and manage your cloud costs. This is especially useful where your AWS resource usage varies significantly and you need to log in to the AWS portal several times a day to track the usage. You can set appropriate alarms when the charges exceed a certain predefined threshold. To enable billing alerts for your AWS account, you have to log in as the account owner and edit the configuration settings. Hence, you can send notifications based on these metrics as e-mails and/or route them to other applications for further processing.

The estimated charges are calculated and sent several times a day to CloudWatch. These metrics include estimated total charges and charges by service. In addition, if you are using the consolidated billing option, then your CloudWatch metrics for estimated charges by linked account and estimated charges by linked account and service are also stored. This data is stored for 2 weeks, and it includes the...