In addition to aggregated monthly bills, AWS can publish to an S3 bucket, upon request, an AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) in CSV format containing the most detailed set of cost and usage data.
You can specify the time granularity of the dataset by hour, day, or month.
The setup is very simple, follow these steps.
To analyze the CUR, you can use either AWS Athena or import the data into AWS Redshift or directly to AWS QuickSight.
Regular analysis of AWS Cost and Usage Reports is a prerequisite for any advanced FinOps operations. We recommend setting up QuickSight Dashboards, such as those provided by Cost & Usage Report Dashboards :: AWS Well-Architected Labs (wellarchitectedlabs.com).
Notes:
- AWS updates the report at least once a day and no record / csv line is considered final until it has populated the field bill_invoice_id
- AWS provides only the set of columns relevant for your particular AWS architecture
- AWS can change the data format at any time – e.g. change of column values upon a service enhancement, or service rename
- The fields are defined in the Data dictionary available on this page
- For AWS Organizations users, CUR reports from all member accounts can be aggregated in a single S3 bucket
- You can ask AWS support to backfill the CUR dataset for any given account for the last year