Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Billing and Cost Management Tools

A healthcare software company wants to analyze their historical data transfer costs across different AWS Regions over the past year. They also need to view a forecast of their costs for the next three months based on these historical trends to help plan their upcoming budget. Which AWS Billing and Cost Management tool should they use to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    AWS Budgets
  2. B
    AWS Pricing Calculator
  3. AWS Cost ExplorerAnswer
  4. D
    AWS Billing Conductor

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is correct because it is the primary AWS tool designed to visualize, analyze, and forecast historical cost and usage data over time, including filtering by attributes like AWS Region.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary operational requirement.
The company needs to analyze actual historical costs (specifically data transfer costs across regions) and generate a multi-month cost forecast based on past trends.
This determines whether a proactive monitoring tool (AWS Budgets), a pre-deployment estimation tool (AWS Pricing Calculator), a billing customization tool (AWS Billing Conductor), or a historical analysis tool (AWS Cost Explorer) is needed.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of AWS Cost Explorer against these requirements.
AWS Cost Explorer is designed to visualize, filter, and analyze historical AWS costs (including by Region or tag) and natively offers a forecasting engine for future costs.
Comparing capabilities shows that AWS Cost Explorer satisfies both the historical filtering and forecasting requirements.

Key Concept

AWS Cost Explorer historical analysis and forecasting capabilities
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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