FAQs

You can get started using AWS Data Exports by navigating to the AWS Data Exports page in the Billing and Cost Management console or by accessing the AWS Data Exports API in the AWS CLI/SDKs. From here you can create an export by visually selecting the table and columns to export or by writing a query using basic SQL (column selection and row-filtering) and then specifying all delivery preferences.

AWS Data Exports allows you to write queries using basic SQL on tables that AWS provides of your billing and cost management data. Exports are delivered on a recurring basis.

AWS Data Exports allows you to customize your billing and cost management data using basic SQL so you can select only the data you want to process. You can create different views that include only the data that your stakeholders are allowed to see, or remove the data that you don’t need to reduce the size of the export. Also, with a SQL interface, AWS Data Exports ensures that you always receive your data with the schema and contents you specify.

AWS Data Exports allows you to create exports of three different tables:

1. Cost and Usage Report (CUR) 2.0: Contains your most granular cost and usage data from AWS.
2. FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns: Contains your cost and usage data formatted with the open-source FOCUS 1.0 specification.
3. Cost Optimization Recommendations (from Cost Optimization Hub): Contains your AWS cost optimization recommendations consolidated by Cost Optimization Hub.

CUR 2.0 provides the following improvements over CUR: 1/ Consistent schema – The CUR 2.0 table always contains a fixed set of columns whereas CUR dynamically includes columns in your report based on your usage in a given month. 2/ Nested data – CUR 2.0 reduces data sparsity by collapsing certain columns from CUR into individual columns with key-value pairs of the collapsed columns. The nested keys can optionally be queried in AWS Data Exports as separate columns to match the original CUR schema and data. 3/ Additional columns – CUR 2.0 contains two additional columns ‘bill_payer_account_name’ and ‘line_item_usage_account_name’.

The CUR 2.0 is the most detailed source of AWS cost and usage data and is recommended for your most complex Cloud Financial Management tasks. For example, the CUR 2.0 has the option to contain split cost allocation data which provides a detailed breakdown of your EKS and ECS container costs. This data is not currently available in FOCUS 1.0. The FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns export is recommended when you are looking for standardization of cost and usage data across multiple cloud or software vendors.

Exports of your cost optimization recommendations make it easier to bring your recommendations into other tools, such as Business Intelligence dashboards or analytics services, to share savings opportunities with stakeholders or track your cloud optimization progress. Many customers find export files easier to work with compared to using the paginated APIs of the Cost Optimization Hub feature.

The Cost and Usage Dashboard enables a seamless integration of your cost and usage data with Amazon QuickSight, and provides you with a pre-built interactive dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight.

You can create a Cost and Usage Dashboard by selecting the Cost and Usage Dashboard tile on the AWS Data Exports home page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console, connecting your Amazon QuickSight account, and configuring an Amazon S3 bucket.

Cost and Usage Dashboard prepares the data for analysis by creating a summary view of your cost and usage data by filtering out data, renaming fields, and adding calculated fields. It then stores the prepared data in Amazon QuickSight’s in-memory engine SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), and selects the best type of visualizations for the selected fields. Your Cost and Usage Dashboard is updated once in every 24 hours.  

You should use Cost and Usage Dashboard if you want to securely share a summary view of your Cost and Usage Report 2.0 table, and insights with everyone in your organization, including the ones who may not have access to the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.

Cost and Usage Dashboard is an easy to deploy, secure and pre-built dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight and inspired from the open source project Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID). Cost and Usage Dashboard includes a subset of the summary visuals without the resource level views from the CUDOS dashboard which is one of the 6 Cloud Intelligence Dashboards. Cost and Usage Dashboard brings the benefits of CUDOS solution into an AWS Billing and Cost Management console feature that is easy to setup, and frees you from maintaining the underlying infrastructure like Amazon Athena views or AWS Glue crawlers. You can deploy Cost and Usage Dashboard from the Data Exports page in Billing and Cost Management console within minutes. CID involves AWS CloudFormation template based deployment. You can setup the complete CID solution by visiting AWS well architected labs.