Using the AWS Billing and Cost Management home page

Use the Billing and Cost Management home page for an overview of your AWS cloud financial management data and to help you make faster and more informed decisions. Understand high-level cost trends and drivers, quickly identify anomalies or budget overruns which require your attention, review recommended actions, understand cost allocation coverage, and identify savings opportunities.

The data on this page comes from AWS Cost Explorer. If you haven’t used Cost Explorer before, it’s automatically enabled for you once you visit this page. It can take up to 24 hours for your data to appear on this page. When available, your data will be refreshed at least once every 24 hours. The Cost Explorer data on the home page is tailored for analytical purposes. This means the data can differ from your invoices and the Bills page due to differences in how data is grouped into AWS services; how discounts, credits, refunds, and taxes are displayed; differences in timing for the current month's estimated charges; and rounding.

For more information, see Knowing the differences between Billing and Cost Explorer data.

For more information about AWS Cloud Financial Management, see the Getting started page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. You can choose a topic and then follow the links to that specific console page or the documentation.

Managing Billing and Cost Management widgets

You can customize how the widgets appear by moving or resizing the widgets.

To manage the Billing and Cost Management widgets

1. Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/costmanagement.

2. (Optional) To customize the Billing and Cost Management home page, drag and drop a widget to move it, or change the widget size.

3. To take action on each recommendation or to learn more, review the data in the widget and then follow the links in the widget.

4. To reset the layout, choose Reset layout and then choose Reset.

You can use the following widgets:

• Cost summary

• Cost monitor

• Cost breakdown

• Recommended actions

• Savings opportunities

Cost summary

The cost summary widget provides a quick view of your current cost trends compared to your spending in the last month.

To view your month-to-date estimated charges on the Bills page, choose View bill.

All metrics shown in the cost summary widget exclude credits and refunds. This means you might see different numbers on the home page compared to the Bills page or your invoices. The widget shows the following metrics that you can choose to view in Cost Explorer:

• Month-to-date cost – Your estimated costs for the current month. The trend indicator compares the current month's costs to last month's cost for the same time period.

• Last month's cost for same time period – Your costs for last month, for the same time period. For example, if today is February 15, the widget also shows last month's cost for January 1–15.

  Note

  Trend calculations might be influenced by the number of days in each month. For example, on July 31, the trend indicator will look at costs from July 1–31 and compare it to costs for June 1–30.

• Total forecasted cost for current month – A forecast of your estimated total costs for the current month.

• Last month's total cost – The total costs for last month. For more information, choose each metric to view the costs in Cost Explorer, or choose View bill to view your month-to-date estimated charges on the Bills page.

  Note

  The metrics in this widget exclude credits and refunds. The costs here might differ from the costs on the Bills page or your invoices.

For more information about Cost Explorer, see Forecasting with Cost Explorer.

Cost monitor

This widget provides a quick view of your cost and usage budgets and any cost anomalies that AWS detected, so that you can fix it.

• Budgets status – Alerts you if any of your cost and usage budgets were exceeded.

  The status can be the following:

• OK – Cost and usage budgets haven't been exceeded.

• Over budget – A cost and usage budget has been exceeded. Your actual cost is greater than 100%. The number of exceeded budgets and a warning icon will appear.

• Setup required – You haven't created any cost and usage budgets.

Choose the status indicator to go to the Budgets page to review details of each budget or to create one. The budgets status indicator only shows information about cost and usage budgets. Budgets that you created to track the coverage or utilization of your Savings Plans or reservations won't appear in this widget. Cost anomalies status alerts you if AWS detected any anomalies with your costs since the first day of the current month. The status can be the following:

• OK – Cost anomalies haven't been detected in the current month.

• Anomalies detected – A cost anomaly has been detected. The number of anomalies detected and a warning icon will appear.

• Setup required – You haven't created any anomaly detection monitors.

Choose the status indicator to go to the Cost Anomaly Detection page to review details of each anomaly detected, or to create an anomaly detection monitor. The cost anomalies status indicator only displays information about cost anomalies detected in the current month. To view your full anomaly history, go to the Cost Anomaly Detection page.

For more information about budgets, see Managing your costs with AWS Budgets.

For more information about anomaly detection monitors, see Detecting unusual spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.

Cost breakdown

This widget provides a breakdown of your costs for the last six months, so you can understand cost trends and drivers. To break down your costs, choose an option from the dropdown list:

• Service

• AWS Region

• Member account (for AWS Organizations management accounts)

• Cost allocation tag

• Cost category

If you choose cost category or cost allocation tag key, hover over the chart to see the values.

To dive deeper into your cost and usage, choose Analyze your costs in Cost Explorer. Use Cost Explorer to visualize, group, and filter your costs and usage, with additional dimensions, such as Availability Zone, instance type, and database engine.

For more information about Cost Explorer, see Exploring your data using Cost Explorer.

Recommended actions

This widget helps you implement AWS cloud financial management best practices and optimize your costs.

To use the recommended actions widget

1. For each recommendation, follow the link to take action on your account. By default, the widget shows up to seven recommended actions.

2. To load additional recommended actions, choose Load more actions.

3. To dismiss a specific recommendation, choose the X icon on the top right corner.

Note

If you don’t have permission to access the AWS service that shows each recommendation, you will see an access denied error. For example, if you have access to all Billing and Cost Management actions except budgets:DescribeBudgets, you can view all recommendations on the page except for budgets. See the error message about adding the missing IAM action to your policy.

This widget provides the following recommendations:

Budgets

This widget shows recommendations if any budgets require your attention, such as the following examples:

• Cost and usage budgets have been exceeded or are forecasted to be exceeded

• Savings Plan, reservation coverage, or utilization has dropped below the defined budget thresholds

• Your custom budget alert thresholds have been exceeded

Unlike the cost monitor widget, this widget shows information related to:

• Budgets that are forecasted to be exceeded but haven’t yet

• Budgets that are in alarm but haven't been exceeded

• Utilization and coverage budgets for your Savings Plans or reservations

Cost anomaly detection

This widget shows recommendations if any anomalies have been detected that require your attention. Unlike the cost monitor widget, this widget shows cost anomalies that were detected in the last 90 days with a total cost impact greater than $100 and an impact percentage greater than 40%.

Cost optimization

This widget shows recommendations for the following reasons:

• To help you improve cost efficiency and lower your AWS bill. You will see recommendations from AWS Cost Optimization Hub when the total estimated savings amount is at least 5% of last month’s costs.

• To review under-utilized Savings Plans or reservations

• To renew any Savings Plans or reservations that will expire within the next 30 days

AWS Free Tier

This widget shows recommendations if your usage exceeded 85% of any service's free tier usage limits.

Getting started

This widget shows recommendations to implement AWS cloud financial management best practices, such as:

• Create budgets to track and govern spending

• You have active Savings Plans but haven't created a Savings Plan budget

• You have Reserved Instance commitments but haven't created a Reserved Instance budget

• Add an alternate billing contact so that the correct people receive communications from AWS

• You haven't set up a cost anomaly monitor

Related resources

For more information, see the following topics:

• Managing your costs with AWS Budgets

• Detecting unusual spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

• Cost Optimization Hub

• Using the AWS Free Tier

• Adding additional billing contact email addresses

Cost allocation coverage

To create cost visibility and accountability in your organization, it's important to allocate costs to teams, applications, environments, or other dimensions. This widget shows unallocated costs for your cost categories and cost allocation tags, so that you can identify where to take action to organize your costs.

Cost allocation coverage is defined as the percentage of your costs that don't have a value assigned to the cost category or cost allocation tag keys that you've created.

Example

• Your month-to-date spend is $100, and you created a cost category (named Teams) to organize costs by individual teams.

• You have $40 in the Team A cost category value, $35 in the Team B cost category value, and $25 that are unallocated.

• In this case, your cost allocation coverage is 25/100 = 25%.

A lower unallocated cost metric means that your costs are properly allocated along the dimensions important to your organization. For more information, see Building a cost allocation strategy in the Best Practices for Tagging AWS Resources whitepaper.

This widget compares the month-to-date unallocated cost percentage to all of last month's unallocated cost percentage. The widget shows up to five cost allocation tag keys or five cost categories. If you have more than five of either cost allocation tag keys or cost categories, use the widget preferences to specify the ones that you want.

To analyze your unallocated costs in more detail by using Cost Explorer, choose the cost category or cost allocation name.

To improve cost allocation coverage for your cost categories or cost allocation tags, you can edit your cost category rules or improve resource tagging by using AWS Tag Editor.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Managing your costs with AWS cost categories

• Using AWS cost allocation tags

• Using Tag Editor

Savings opportunities

This widget shows recommendations from Cost Optimization Hub to help you save money and lower your AWS bill. This can include:

• Deleting unused resources

• Rightsizing over-provisioned resources

• Purchasing Savings Plans or reservations

For each savings opportunity, the widget shows your estimated monthly savings. Your estimated savings are de-duplicated and automatically adjusted for each recommended savings opportunity.

Example

• Let's say that you have two Amazon EC2 instances, InstanceA and InstanceB.

• If you purchased a Savings Plan, you could reduce the cost for InstanceA by $20 and the cost of InstanceB by $10, for a total of $30 savings.

• However, if InstanceB is idle, the widget might recommend that you terminate it instead of purchasing a Savings Plan. The savings opportunity would tell you how much you could save by terminating the idle InstanceB.

To view the savings opportunities in this widget, you can opt in by visiting the Cost Optimization Hub page or using the Cost Management preferences page.

Understanding the Billing dashboard

Note

You can access the previous version of the Billing home page from the Legacy Pages section of the navigation pane.

Understanding the Billing dashboard (old console)

You can use the dashboard page of the AWS Billing console to gain a general view of your AWS spending. You can also use it to identify your highest cost service or Region and view trends in your spending over the past few months. You can use the dashboard page to see various breakdowns of your AWS usage. This is especially useful if you're a Free Tier user. To view more details about your AWS costs and invoices, choose Billing details in the left navigation pane. You can customize your dashboard layout at any time by choosing the gear icon at the top of the page to match your use case.

Viewing your AWS costs in the AWS Billing console dashboard doesn't require turning on Cost Explorer. To turn on Cost Explorer to access additional views of your cost and usage data, see Enabling AWS Cost Explorer.

To open the AWS Billing console and dashboard

• Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.

By default, the console shows the AWS Billing Dashboard page.

Understanding your dashboard page

Your AWS Billing console dashboard contains the following sections. To create your preferred layout, drag and drop sections of the Dashboard page. To customize the visible sections and layout, choose the gear icon at the top of the page. These preferences are stored for ongoing visits to the Dashboard page. To temporarily remove sections from your view, choose the x icon for each section. To make all sections visible, choose refresh at the top of the page.

AWS summary

This section is an overview of your AWS costs across all accounts, AWS Regions, service providers, and services, and other KPIs. Total compared to prior period displays your total AWS costs for the most recent closed month. It also provides a comparison to your total forecasted costs for the current month. Choose the gear icon on the card to decide which KPIs you want to display.

Highest cost and usage details

This section shows your top service, account, or AWS Region by estimated month-to-date (MTD) spend. To choose which to view, choose the gear icon on the top right.

Cost trend by top five services

In this section, you can see the cost trend for your top five services for the most recent three to six closed billing periods.

You can choose between chart types and time periods on the top of the section. You can adjust additional preferences using the gear icon.

The columns provide the following information:

• Average: The average cost over the trailing three months.

• Total: The total for the most recent closed month.

• Trend: Compares the Total column with the Average column.

Account cost trend

This section shows the cost trend for your account for the most recent three to six closed billing periods. If you're a management account of AWS Organizations, the cost trend by top five section shows your top five AWS accounts for the most recent three to six closed billing periods. If invoices weren't already issued, the data isn't visible in this section.

You can choose between chart types and time periods on the top of the section. Adjust additional preferences using the gear icon.

The columns provide the following information:

• Average: The average cost over the trailing three months.

• Total: The total for the most recent closed month.

• Trend: Compares the Total column with the Average column.

On the dashboard, you can view the following graphs:

• Spend Summary

• Month-to-Date Spend by Service

• Month-to-Date Top Services by Spend

Spend Summary

The Spend Summary graph shows you how much you spent last month, the estimated costs of your AWS usage for the month-to-date, and a forecast for how much you are likely to spend this month. The forecast is an estimate that's based on your past AWS costs. Therefore, your actual monthly costs might not match the forecast.

Month-to-Date Spend by Service

The Month-to-Date Spend by Service graph shows the top services that you use most and the proportion of your costs that service contributed to. The Month-to-Date Spend by Service graph doesn't include forecasting.

Month-to-Date Top Services by Spend

The Month-to-Date Top Services by Spend graph shows the services that you use most, along with the costs incurred for the month to date. The Month-to-Date Top Services by Spend graph doesn't include forecasting.

Note

The Billing and Cost Management console has a refresh time of approximately 24 hours to reflect your billing data.