Question

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

An enterprise is launching a new multi-tenant application on AWS. The finance team requires a proactive cost monitoring strategy to alert them immediately if the daily cost of a specific project (tracked via the cost allocation tag Project:Apollo) exceeds a budgeted threshold of $500. Additionally, the operations team needs to receive automated alerts if there is any anomalous, unexpected spending spike across the entire AWS account, regardless of historical benchmarks or tags, to quickly investigate potential resource misconfigurations. Which combination of AWS cost management features should the solutions architect implement to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Create a daily cost budget in AWS Budgets, filter by the Project:Apollo tag, and configure a notification to email the finance team when the actual or forecasted daily spend exceeds $500.Answer
  2. Configure an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor for the AWS account, and set up an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to alert the operations team when unusual spending is detected.Answer
  3. C
    Set up a daily scheduled report in AWS Cost Explorer filtered by the Project:Apollo tag, and create an Amazon CloudWatch metric alarm on the report output to notify the finance team when costs exceed $500.
  4. D
    Use AWS Billing Conductor to configure a custom billing group for the account, and configure its built-in anomaly detection module to send real-time alerts to the operations team.
  5. E
    Purchase a Compute Savings Plan to automatically apply cost discounts to the Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS databases used by the Project:Apollo application to prevent budget threshold breaches.

Answer

Create a daily cost budget in AWS Budgets, filter by the Project:Apollo tag, and configure email alerts for threshold breaches. Additionally, configure an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor for the account with an Amazon SNS topic to alert on unexpected spending spikes.
To proactively monitor specific tag-based daily budgets, AWS Budgets is the correct tool because it allows filtering by the 'Project:Apollo' tag and sending email notifications when daily thresholds are breached. To detect sudden account-wide spikes in spend, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to identify unexpected costs and can alert the operations team immediately via Amazon SNS.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the requirement for proactive, tag-based alerts.
Determine that AWS Budgets supports daily granularity tracking filtered by cost allocation tags (Project:Apollo) with threshold alerts based on actual or forecasted amounts.
This directly satisfies the finance team's need to be alerted when the project daily cost exceeds $500.
2
Identify the requirement for anomalous spend detection.
Select AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with an AWS account monitor and Amazon SNS alerts.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is the designated service to detect unexpected spikes in spending using machine learning, addressing the operations team's requirement.
3
Evaluate and eliminate incorrect cost monitoring approaches.
Reject retrospective or administrative tools such as AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Billing Conductor for real-time alerting, and reject Savings Plans as they do not apply to RDS and S3.
Ensures the selected solutions are the most efficient and accurate tools for the specific monitoring requirements.

Key Concept

AWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tools
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