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CLF-C02 Practice Question 90: Cost Trend Analysis

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 9 · question 10 of 10

Billing, Pricing & Supporteasy

A finance manager wants to see how the company's monthly AWS costs have changed over the past year, broken down by service, and to see a forecast of spending for the coming months. The manager wants to do this in the AWS console at no extra charge. Which tool should the manager use?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is the tool for viewing and analyzing costs and usage. It shows up to the last 13 months of data, can be filtered and grouped (for example by service), and forecasts spending for the next 18 months. It also includes Reserved Instance reports and recommendations. Using the Cost Explorer user interface is free of charge. Only programmatic access through the Cost Explorer API is billed per request.

Option A, AWS Pricing Calculator, estimates the cost of an architecture you describe *before* building it. It has no view of what the company actually spent. Option C, AWS Budgets, tracks spend against a threshold and sends alerts. It answers "are we over budget?", not "how have costs changed by service over the year?". Option D, AWS Trusted Advisor, recommends improvements such as cost savings and security fixes. It is not a tool for analyzing spending history.

Reference: Analyzing your costs and usage with AWS Cost Explorer

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