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Difficulty: HardAWS Billing and Cost Management Tools

A digital publishing company wants to manage its AWS spending across various development teams. The finance department needs to generate reports that project future spending patterns over the next 12 months based on historical usage. Additionally, they must configure automated alerts that notify administrators when actual costs exceed 90% of their monthly limit, or when forecasted monthly costs are projected to exceed 100% of that limit. Which of the following AWS Billing and Cost Management tools should the company implement to achieve these two goals? (Select TWO.)

  1. AWS Cost Explorer to forecast usage and visualize historical cost patterns up to 12 months out.Answer
  2. AWS Budgets to set custom cost limits and configure notifications for both actual and forecasted budget thresholds.Answer
  3. C
    AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the costs of their current running resources and configure proactive threshold alerts.
  4. D
    AWS Billing Conductor to configure custom pricing rules and generate pro-forma bills that trigger alerts based on forecasted team spending.

Answer

The company should use AWS Cost Explorer to forecast usage and visualize cost patterns, and AWS Budgets to set custom limits and configure notifications.
The correct answer combines the capabilities of AWS Cost Explorer (for historical visualization and 12-month forecasting) and AWS Budgets (for proactive alerting on actual and forecasted cost thresholds). Together, these tools satisfy the requirements of generating long-term cost projections and alerting administrators when costs threaten to exceed budget limits.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the first requirement: projecting future spending patterns over 12 months based on historical usage.
Identify that AWS Cost Explorer is designed to visualize past costs and generate future forecasts up to 12 months out.
Cost Explorer excels at historical visualization and forward-looking trend analysis.
2
Analyze the second requirement: setting up alerts for when actual costs exceed 90% or forecasted costs exceed 100% of a budget limit.
Identify that AWS Budgets is the primary tool for creating budget alerts based on actual and forecasted cost thresholds.
AWS Budgets allows proactive monitoring and alerting when spending thresholds are breached.
3
Evaluate distractors like AWS Pricing Calculator and AWS Billing Conductor.
Eliminate them because the Pricing Calculator is for pre-deployment estimates and Billing Conductor is for custom billing logic and pro-forma invoicing, not for historical forecasting or real-time budget alerting.
This ensures only the correct tools mapping to the specific requirements are chosen.

Key Concept

AWS Cost Explorer vs AWS Budgets functionality
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Topics

AWS Billing and Cost Management Tools

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