Monthly cost allocation report - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Narrator] Now that you've seen how to configure cost allocation tags, it's time to set up a cost allocation report that utilizes these tags. The monthly cost allocation report contains AWS usage for you account by product category and linked account user. It also includes additional columns for your tag keys. To set up a monthly cost allocation report, log into your AWS management console and click your display name in the upper right corner, then click, My Billing Dashboard. On the left navigation pane, click billing preferences. Expand the section called detailed billing reports and click the check box to enable legacy detailed billing reports. Though AWS calls this a legacy report, the information is organized in a structured and easy to consume manner. AWS stores billing reports in an S3 bucket created and owned by you. To specify an S3 bucket, click configure. Provide the name and region of a new bucket or select an existing bucket. Click next, review the policy that AWS will apply to the bucket. Scrolling down, you will see that the policy allows put object permissions on the bucket. Confirm that the policy is correct, and click save. In the report list, enable cost allocation report and click save preferences. Bear in mind that AWS will store your reports in the S3 bucket that you specified. Here is a cost allocation report that I downloaded earlier. It tracks charges for resources based on activated tags. Scrolling to the right side, you can see that tag keys are displayed as column headings. Any charges that can not be grouped by tags are organized by account or product or line item. This could happen if you signed up for the report mid month or if you haven't tagged our resources, or if you're using resources that don't support tagging and also for one-time fees and subscription-based charges. In addition to the monthly cost allocation report there is another report that you can use to understand your cost allocation across various resources. This report is known as the cost and usage report. The cost and usage report is also configured from My Billing Dashboard. On the left navigation pane, click cost and usage reports, then click, create report, provide a report name. Here is a list of items that will be included in the report. Use the check box to include individual resource IDs. Use the automatically refresh your cost and usage report check box, to refresh your report when charges are detected for the previous month after your bill has been generated. This is the case when AWS applies refunds, credits or support fees to your account, click next. Click the configure button to provide S3 bucket information. Provide the name and region of a new bucket or select an existing bucket, click next. Review and accept that the policy is correct, and click save. Provide a path prefix to pretend to the name of your report. Then select the time granularity, which can be hourly, daily or monthly. Use a report versioning to specify if you'd like new report versions to be created or overwrite existing reports. Use these check boxes to enable report data integration with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift or Amazon QuickSight, then select the compression type, and click next. Review your selections, and click, review and complete. Here is a report that I configured earlier. Bear in mind, this report is the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. This means your CSV report could contain information that may not be required making the report look overwhelming. By applying filters, you will be able to trim it down to only the required data. As you can see, this report includes detailed information such as billing start date, end date, usage type, product name, pricing unit and cost. To give you a sense of the amount of information included in this report, I'll quickly scroll past the columns. The report also includes cost allocation tags that you applied to your resources. This is only part of the information I've hidden some columns to make the report more readable. So we've demonstrated how to configure cost allocation tags. but tagging your resources isn't enough, an efficient and uniform strategy needs to be in place to ensure that cost allocation data provided by your tags aligns with your financial reporting dimensions.