[Answered] What is the difference between AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer

When managing your AWS costs, it’s important to understand the differences between AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer. Both powerful tools serve unique purposes in cost management and forecasting but are deployed in different ways.

AWS Budgets:

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets tailored to your specific needs. You can create budgets to track overall costs, service-specific costs, resource-specific usage, and much more. Not only can you track costs that have already incurred, but you can also receive proactive alerts when spending approaches or exceeds certain thresholds.

Key Features:

Custom Budget Creation: Define budgets based on different AWS services, linked accounts, tags, or time periods.
Real-Time Alerts: Get notified via email or Amazon SNS when spending approaches or exceeds your defined budgets.
Forecasting: AWS Budgets can provide a forecast of future costs based on your historical usage patterns.
Actionable Automations: You have the option to set automated actions (ex: stop resources) when certain budget thresholds are hit.

Use Case:

AWS Budgets is best for organizations needing proactive cost monitoring and alerting. It can help manage overruns by sending timely notifications or triggering automated actions like shutting down resources.

AWS Cost Explorer:

AWS Cost Explorer is more of an analytical tool built for analyzing historical usage patterns and projecting future spend. It provides interactive visualizations that allow users to dissect cost drivers, identify trends, and explore spend breakdown by services, linked accounts, regions, tags, and more.

Key Features:

Detailed Historical Cost Analysis: You can access detailed reports of your past AWS spend as far back as 12 months.
Cost Forecasting: Based on your past usage, Cost Explorer provides forecasts to project future spending trends.
Resource Cost Breakdown: Drill down to see costs by service, account, tags, or custom-defined metrics.
Usage & Reservation Reports: You can analyze reserved instances (RIs), savings plans, and their usages to ensure you're maximizing the financial efficiency of reserved resources.

Use Case:

AWS Cost Explorer is ideal for organizations that want to explore historical data and trends, optimize resource usage, and review detailed breakdowns of costs across regions, services, or tags.

Summary Comparison: AWS Budgets vs AWS Cost Explorer

| Feature | AWS Budgets | AWS Cost Explorer | |-------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------| | Primary Purpose | Budgeting and proactive alerts | Cost analysis and resource optimization | | Historical Data | Up to current billing period | Up to 12 months of cost and usage data | | Alerts and Automations | Yes, via thresholds (email or SNS notifications) | No direct alerts (used mostly for manual analysis) | | Forecasting | Basic high-level forecast | Detailed forecasting with trends analysis | | Service Coverage | Cost and usage at high-level or resource-specific | Granular breakdown of services, accounts, tags, etc. | | Cost Detail | Focuses on adherence to a defined budget | In-depth analysis at multiple levels (tags, services, etc.) | | Proactive Actions | Enables automating actions (e.g., stop instances) | No direct actioning, only insights |

For holistic management, many organizations use both tools in tandem. AWS Budgets helps you stick to the plan, while AWS Cost Explorer helps you investigate what happened. You can rely on Budgets to manage overspending alerts and Cost Explorer to dive deeper into why certain costs incurred.

Conclusion:

While both tools complement each other, AWS Budgets is more suited for tracking and containing costs, offering proactive alerts and automation. AWS Cost Explorer, on the other hand, provides a richer detailed analysis of how and where your costs are being generated. By using both tools effectively, you can maintain strong visibility over your AWS expenditures and optimize cloud usage more effectively.