A healthcare startup needs to manage its AWS cloud expenses. The team wants to receive an email notification if their monthly database costs are forecasted to exceed a specific limit. Additionally, they need to view and analyze interactive charts showing their monthly EC2 and Amazon S3 spending over the last three months to identify trends. Which of the following tools should the company use to meet these requirements? (Select TWO).
- AWS Budgets to create custom cost budgets that trigger email notifications when forecasted database costs exceed the specified threshold.Answer
- AWS Cost Explorer to visualize monthly historical spending patterns and view cost trends broken down by individual AWS services.Answer
- CAWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly costs of running databases and EC2 instances before launching them.
- DAWS Billing Conductor to customize billing parameters and generate pro-forma invoices for internal cost allocation between departments.
Answer
The correct tools are AWS Budgets (for proactive notifications when costs are projected to exceed a threshold) and AWS Cost Explorer (for visualizing historical cost trends broken down by service).
AWS Budgets allows the startup to set custom budgets and configure alerts that trigger when actual or forecasted costs exceed a threshold, which satisfies the requirement for proactive alerting. AWS Cost Explorer provides a visual interface to view and analyze historical cost and usage patterns by service over a specified time period, satisfying the visualization requirement.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
AWS Billing and Cost Management tools differ in function: AWS Budgets is proactive, whereas AWS Cost Explorer is retrospective and analytical.