Question: What is the difference between AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor?

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor are both powerful tools offered by AWS to help users optimize their cloud spending. However, they serve different purposes and are best utilized together for comprehensive cost management and optimization.

1. Purpose

• AWS Cost Explorer:
  AWS Cost Explorer is primarily a financial management tool designed to help you visualize, analyze, and understand your AWS costs. It provides detailed reporting on your usage and costs, allowing you to see trends over time and understand cost drivers. The tool is especially useful for budget forecasting and helps you track your AWS cost patterns through various filters (such as account, service, region, etc.).

• AWS Trusted Advisor:
  AWS Trusted Advisor, on the other hand, is a best practice audit and recommendation tool that provides real-time recommendations not just for cost optimization, but also for improving security, performance, high availability, and fault tolerance. Specifically, under cost optimization, it alerts you to unused or under-utilized resources, like idle EC2 instances or unattached Elastic IPs.

2. Key Use Cases

• AWS Cost Explorer:

  • Cost breakdowns by service, region, or linked accounts.
  • Custom reports to track periodic spending.
  • Cost forecasting for future budgets based on historical data.
  • Savings Plans and Reserved Instances purchase recommendations based on usage patterns.

• AWS Trusted Advisor:

  • Recommendation engine for finding idle resources, such as unused RDS instances or underutilized S3 storage.
  • Checks related to security vulnerabilities like open access permissions or outdated SSL certificates.
  • Performance tuning checks (e.g., ensuring load balancer configurations are optimal).
  • Fault tolerance guidance by identifying potential single points of failure.

3. Granularity of Cost Insights

• AWS Cost Explorer: Provides granular insights into cost and usage data, offering multiple filtering options. You can view costs by service, tag, hourly granularity, and even export it for custom analysis.

• AWS Trusted Advisor: Focuses on specific actionable recommendations to optimize costs (e.g., resize or terminate ec2 instances) rather than providing deep, granular reporting or projections of historical costs.

4. Pricing

• AWS Cost Explorer:
  It is a free service for basic usage, although AWS introduces charges for advanced features like the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) API or more detailed data extraction methods.

• AWS Trusted Advisor:
  Basic cost-related checks come with the standard AWS support plans for free. However, for more detailed recommendations, you require the Business or Enterprise Support plans.

5. Example Scenarios

• Use AWS Cost Explorer:
  When you want to create custom reports for your team or need detailed breakdowns on what services are driving your AWS bill over a specific period.

• Use Trusted Advisor:
  When you're looking for low-hanging-fruit type recommendations to save costs quickly, such as identifying idle EC2 instances or unattached Elastic Load Balancers that are wasting money.

Summary

• AWS Cost Explorer gives businesses granular insights and historical trends of their spending patterns and helps in budgeting. It’s great for custom reporting.
• AWS Trusted Advisor, while covering multiple areas of optimization, offers practical recommendations, including cost-savings ideas stemming from unused or under-utilized resources.

Both services should be used together for effective cost optimization. Trusted Advisor helps identify actionable steps to reduce immediate spending, while Cost Explorer is excellent for tracking cost trends and planning for future financial decisions.