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

A company manages a multi-account environment under AWS Organizations. During a monthly billing cycle review, the operations team discovered that a development team had accidentally left high-cost Amazon EC2 instances running over the weekend, resulting in a significant cost overrun. The company needs a solution that automatically detects unusual or sudden cost spikes and alerts the team within 24 hours of occurrence, without requiring manual configuration of static thresholds for every AWS service.

Which solution should a Solutions Architect implement to meet these requirements with the least administrative effort?

  1. Configure AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with an AWS Organization monitor type, and define an alert subscription to notify the operations team via an Amazon SNS topic.Answer
  2. B
    Configure AWS Cost Explorer to generate daily reports on resource spend and write a custom script to analyze historical trends reactively.
  3. C
    Deploy a continuously running AWS Lambda function that queries the Cost Explorer API hourly to detect cost fluctuations and compute custom metrics.
  4. D
    Purchase Compute Savings Plans to automatically cover the potential cost overruns of all compute and Amazon RDS database resources across the organization.

Answer

Configure AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with an AWS Organization monitor type, and define an alert subscription to notify the operations team via an Amazon SNS topic.
The correct solution uses AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, which leverages machine learning to dynamically monitor cost patterns across the entire AWS Organization. This requires minimal administrative effort because it does not require defining static budget thresholds for each service or account. Alerts are sent automatically via Amazon SNS within 24 hours of anomaly detection.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the need for dynamic anomaly detection.
Identify that static budgets (AWS Budgets) are not requested because the scenario requires detection without manual configuration of static thresholds.
Static budgets require defining fixed thresholds, which increases administrative effort and might miss anomalies that do not exceed the overall budget.
2
Compare proactive alert capabilities of cost tools.
Select AWS Cost Anomaly Detection over AWS Cost Explorer reports.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to automatically detect unexpected spikes and send alerts within 24 hours. AWS Cost Explorer is meant for retrospective analysis and does not support real-time proactive alerting.
3
Ensure organization-wide coverage with minimal overhead.
Use the AWS Organization monitor type linked to Amazon SNS.
This configuration monitors all member accounts automatically, alerting the operations team via SNS without needing custom polling scripts or lambda functions.

Key Concept

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to dynamically detect unusual spending patterns across all AWS accounts in an organization and proactively alert teams without the administrative overhead of setting up static budgets.
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Topics

AWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tool Analysis