Getting started with Application Cost Profiler

AWS Application Cost Profiler helps you get cost information about your AWS resources by reporting resource usage by tenant, rather than for the resource as a whole. A tenant can be a user, a group of users, or a project. Make sure that you can identify your resource usage by the tenant you choose. To get cost reports about tenant usage, you configure a report and send usage data to Application Cost Profiler. This section discusses the prerequisites that you must complete before you use Application Cost Profiler.

Topics

• Sign up for an AWS account
• Create an administrative user
• Grant programmatic access
• Application Cost Profiler specific prerequisites
• Next steps
• Setting up Amazon S3 buckets for Application Cost Profiler

Sign up for an AWS account

If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one.

To sign up for an AWS account

1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.

2. Follow the online instructions.

   Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a verification code on the phone keypad.

   When you sign up for an AWS account, an AWS account root user is created. The root user has access to all AWS services and resources in the account. As a security best practice, assign administrative access to an administrative user, and use only the root user to perform tasks that require root user access.

AWS sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to https://aws.amazon.com/ and choosing My Account.

Create an administrative user

After you sign up for an AWS account, secure your AWS account root user, enable AWS IAM Identity Center, and create an administrative user so that you don't use the root user for everyday tasks.

Secure your AWS account root user

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the account owner by choosing Root user and entering your AWS account email address. On the next page, enter your password.

   For help signing in by using root user, see Signing in as the root user in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

2. Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your root user.

   For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for your AWS account root user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

Create an administrative user

1. Enable IAM Identity Center.

   For instructions, see Enabling AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

2. In IAM Identity Center, grant administrative access to an administrative user.

   For a tutorial about using the IAM Identity Center directory as your identity source, see Configure user access with the default IAM Identity Center directory in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Sign in as the administrative user

• To sign in with your IAM Identity Center user, use the sign-in URL that was sent to your email address when you created the IAM Identity Center user.

  For help signing in using an IAM Identity Center user, see Signing in to the AWS access portal in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

Grant programmatic access

Users need programmatic access if they want to interact with AWS outside of the AWS Management Console. The way to grant programmatic access depends on the type of user that's accessing AWS.

To grant users programmatic access, choose one of the following options.

Which user needs programmatic access?	To	By
Workforce identity (Users managed in IAM Identity Center)	Use temporary credentials to sign programmatic requests to the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS APIs.	Following the instructions for the interface that you want to use. For the AWS CLI, see Configuring the AWS CLI to use AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide. For AWS SDKs, tools, and AWS APIs, see IAM Identity Center authentication in the AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide.
IAM	Use temporary credentials to sign programmatic requests to the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS APIs.	Following the instructions in Using temporary credentials with AWS resources in the IAM User Guide.
IAM	(Not recommended) Use long-term credentials to sign programmatic requests to the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS APIs.	Following the instructions for the interface that you want to use. For the AWS CLI, see Authenticating using IAM user credentials in the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide. For AWS SDKs and tools, see Authenticate using long-term credentials in the AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide. For AWS APIs, see Managing access keys for IAM users in the IAM User Guide.

Application Cost Profiler specific prerequisites

Before you get started with Application Cost Profiler, you must complete the following prerequisites:

• Enable Cost Explorer

  Enable AWS Cost Explorer for your AWS account. Setting up an account with Cost Explorer can take up to 24 hours. You must complete Cost Explorer setup before Application Cost Profiler can generate your daily and monthly reports.

  For more information, see Enabling Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

• Create S3 buckets

  Create at least two Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Application Cost Profiler uses one S3 bucket to provide reports to you. You use the other S3 bucket to upload usage data to Application Cost Profiler. Typically, you only need one S3 bucket to upload usage data. However, you might want to have more than one S3 bucket so that you can keep usage for different services in separate S3 buckets with different permissions, if needed for your security. You must give Application Cost Profiler permissions to these S3 buckets.

  For more information about setting up the Amazon S3 buckets for Application Cost Profiler, see Setting up Amazon S3 buckets for Application Cost Profiler.

• Enable tags

  To report usage by tag, rather than by resource, you must enable those tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.

  For more information about activating AWS generated tags, see Activating the AWS-Generated Cost Allocation Tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide. For more information about activating user-defined tags, see Activating User-Defined Cost Allocation Tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

Next steps

After you complete these prerequisites, you can:

• Configure your report and send usage data to Application Cost Profiler. For more information, see Creating your report.

• Get and analyze your generated reports. For more information, see Using Application Cost Profiler reports.