AWS › AWS Cost Management & Billing

What is the AWS Cost and Usage Report, and how does it provide more detailed data than Cost Explorer?

Intermediate

Answer

The AWS Cost and Usage Report, or CUR, is the most comprehensive and granular billing data AWS provides, delivered as detailed files to an S3 bucket on a regular schedule, capturing line item level detail down to individual resource usage, which can then be queried using tools like Athena or loaded into a business intelligence tool like QuickSight for highly customized cost analysis and reporting that goes well beyond what the standard Cost Explorer interface can show.

aws cur put-report-definition --report-definition '{"ReportName":"detailed-billing-report","TimeUnit":"DAILY","S3Bucket":"my-billing-bucket"}'

Real-world example A large enterprise loads its Cost and Usage Report data into Athena and builds a custom QuickSight dashboard that breaks down costs by individual project code, something the standard Cost Explorer console alone could not easily achieve.

Common follow-ups: How do you set up automated querying of Cost and Usage Report data using Athena?;How often is the Cost and Usage Report updated?

Amazon Athena;Amazon QuickSight & Business Intelligence