Amazon EC2 usage reports - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon EC2 usage reports

AWS provides a free reporting tool called AWS Cost Explorer that enables you to analyze the cost and usage of your EC2 instances and the usage of your Reserved Instances. You can view data up to the last 12 months, and forecast how much you are likely to spend for the next three months. You can use Cost Explorer to see patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time, identify areas that need further inquiry, and see trends that you can use to understand your costs. You also can specify time ranges for the data, and view time data by day or by month.

Here's an example of some of the questions that you can answer when using Cost Explorer:

  • How much am I spending on instances of each instance type?

  • How many instance hours are being used by a particular department?

  • How is my instance usage distributed across Availability Zones?

  • How is my instance usage distributed across AWS accounts?

  • How well am I using my Reserved Instances?

  • Are my Reserved Instances helping me save money?

For more information about working with reports in Cost Explorer, including saving reports, see Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

Track your Free Tier usage

You can use Amazon EC2 without incurring charges if you've been an AWS customer for less than 12 months and you stay within the AWS Free Tier usage limits. It's important to track your Free Tier usage to avoid billing surprises. If you exceed the Free Tier limits, you'll incur standard pay-as-go charges.

Note

If you've been an AWS customer for more than 12 months, you're no longer eligible for Free Tier usage and you won't see the EC2 Free Tier box that is described in the following procedure.

To track your Free Tier usage
  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose EC2 Dashboard.

  3. Find the EC2 Free Tier box (at top right).

    
                        The EC2 Free Tier box in the EC2 Dashboard.
  4. In the EC2 Free Tier box, check your Free Tier usage, as follows:

    • Under EC2 Free Tier offers in use, take note of the warnings:

      • End of month forecast – This warns that you will incur charges this month if you continue with your current usage pattern.

      • Exceeds Free Tier – This warns that you've exceeded your Free Tier limits and you're already incurring charges.

    • Under Offer usage (monthly), take note of your usage of Linux instances, Windows instances, and EBS storage. The percentage indicates how much of your Free Tier limits you've used this month. If you're at 100%, you will incur charges for further use.

      Note

      This information appears only after you've created an instance. However, usage information is not updated in real time; it's updated three times a day.

  5. To avoid incurring further charges, delete any resources that are either incurring charges now, or will incur charges if you exceed your Free Tier limit usage.

    • For the instructions to delete your instance, go to the next step in this tutorial.

    • To check if you have resources in other Regions that might be incurring charges, in the EC2 Free Tier box, choose View Global EC2 resources to open the EC2 Global View. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Global View.

  6. To view your resource usage for all AWS services under the AWS Free Tier, at the bottom of the EC2 Free Tier box, choose View all AWS Free Tier offers. For more information, see Using the AWS Free Tier in the AWS Billing User Guide.