---
title: "Cost Explorer for understanding and managing costs"
date: 2019-04-15T17:58:18+03:00
weight: 6
---


## Objectives

In this lab you will quickly develop, build, and deploy an applications on AWS. 





## Services Used in this Lab:

- *AWS Cost Explorer* has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Get started quickly by creating custom reports (including charts and tabular data) that analyze cost and usage data, both at a high level (e.g., total costs and usage across all accounts) and for highly-specific requests (e.g., m2.2xlarge costs within account Y that are tagged “project: secretProject”). 

## Lab Prerequisites

None.

## Expected Costs

Cost explorer is free.

## Lab Steps
 
1. Go to AWS Console and select the menu next to your user id on the top right . Open `My Billing Dashboard`.

1. Go through the steps in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/billing-getting-started.html in your account:

- Step 1: Review Your Usage
- Step 2: Turn on Reports (The reports show you which AWS services you used, the amount of time that you used them, the amount of data that you transferred in and out of storage, the average storage space that you used, and more. Billing and Cost Management can deliver your reports to an Amazon S3 bucket.)
- Step 3: Download or Print Your Bill

1. Step 4: Set Up Budgets to Monitor Your Account. 

- If you use the AWS Free Tier, Billing and Cost Management automatically provides AWS Free Tier usage alerts via AWS Budgets to track your free tier usage. Billing and Cost Management notifies you when you go over the free tier limits or are forecasted to go over the free tier limits. AWS sends these notifications to the email that you used to create your AWS account.

- In addition to the free tier usage alerts, you can use budgets to notify you when your monthly charges for using an AWS product exceed or are forecast to exceed a threshold that you set.

1. Review the following topics at the end of the same Getting Started Page 

- Tracking Your Free Tier Usage
- Understanding Your Usage with Billing Reports
- Analyzing Your Costs with Cost Explorer
- Managing Your Costs with Budgets
- Consolidated Billing for Organizations


## Summary
Congratulations! Using AWS Cost Explorer, you can dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

## Deleting Lab Resources

N/A.