Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tool Analysis

A company manages several AWS accounts consolidated under a single organization in AWS Organizations. The cloud operations team recently identified a sudden, unexpected spike in Amazon EC2 compute charges caused by a developer deploying high-end GPU instances in an unused region. To prevent future surprise costs, the company wants to implement a cost management strategy that achieves two goals: first, automatically detect unusual spend patterns across all accounts and alert the operations team within 2424 hours; second, monitor a specific research department’s tag-based spend (CostCenter=ResearchCostCenter = Research) by notifying the department lead when actual monthly charges reach 80%80\% of the allocated budget, and notifying the finance team when forecasted monthly charges are projected to exceed 100%100\% of the budget. Which combination of actions should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Create an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor with an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) subscription to notify the cloud operations team when an anomaly is detected.Answer
  2. Create an AWS Budget for the Research cost center using tag filters, and configure budget notifications for actual spend at 80%80\% and forecasted spend at 100%100\%.Answer
  3. C
    Configure a daily scheduled AWS Cost Explorer report filtered by region and instance type to notify the cloud operations team of any sudden cost changes.
  4. D
    Set up an AWS Billing Conductor billing group for the Research cost center and configure a pro forma billing rule to notify the department head and finance team when budget thresholds are crossed.
  5. E
    Configure an Amazon CloudWatch billing alarm for the Research department's resources that periodically queries AWS Cost Explorer to alert on forecasted monthly spend overruns.

Answer

Create an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor with an Amazon SNS subscription to notify the operations team of cost anomalies, and create an AWS Budget filtered by the CostCenter tag with alerts set for actual and forecasted spend thresholds.
The correct options are to create an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor and to create an AWS Budget with tag-based filters. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to identify unusual spending patterns across all accounts in an organization and can notify teams via Amazon SNS within 2424 hours of detection. AWS Budgets allows organizations to track costs and usage against budgeted amounts, supporting tag-based filtering (such as CostCenter=ResearchCostCenter = Research) and the creation of alerts based on both actual thresholds (such as 80%80\%) and forecasted thresholds (such as 100%100\%) to target different stakeholders.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the service for detecting unexpected spending spikes within 2424 hours.
Determine that AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a machine learning-backed service that detects unusual spend patterns and can send alerts within 2424 hours via Amazon SNS.
This satisfies the requirement to automatically detect cost anomalies across all accounts in a cost-effective manner.
2
Identify the tool for setting tag-based budgets with actual and forecasted alerts.
Determine that AWS Budgets supports tag-based filters (e.g., CostCenter=ResearchCostCenter = Research) and allows configuring alerts based on both actual spend (80%80\%) and forecasted spend (100%100\%) thresholds.
This satisfies the requirement to monitor specific department spend and alert different stakeholders based on actual and forecasted limits.

Key Concept

Proactive cost monitoring and alerting using AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.
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