Introduction
Understanding cloud spending can be overwhelming without the right tools. Common questions like “Where is my money going?” and “Which AWS services are driving my cloud costs?” can be hard to answer without clear visibility.
That’s where the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) comes in.
With CUR, businesses gain granular insights into AWS billing, helping them break down expenses by service, resource, or account. Without such a tool, gaining transparency into your cloud spend is not only difficult—but often inaccurate and time-consuming.
The good news? AWS provides a native and, best of all, free solution to help you break down your cloud expenses in detail. It’s called the AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR). This guide will cover everything you need to know about CUR, including its latest feature, AWS Data Exports.
Table of Contents
What is the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report, or CUR for short, is exactly what it claims to be: a detailed report that breaks down all of your account’s cost and usage metrics.
Key Characteristics:
- You can configure AWS Cost and Usage Reports to publish CSV report files to an Amazon S3 bucket.
- CUR can update your reports up to three times a day.
- CUR also breaks down costs by service, resource, and user-defined tags.
- CUR integrates natively with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight for data analytics.
The CUR is the single source of truth when it comes to billing. At the end of the month, the sum of all the costs in the CUR should add up perfectly to your monthly AWS bill.
Say Hello to a Sample CUR
So what does a sample CUR look like? Well, we’re glad you asked… or are we?
Why Should You Use the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)?
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Detailed Cost Breakdown | AWS CUR offers granular billing insights across services, accounts, and resources. Businesses can track AWS costs precisely and identify expensive services, enabling better cloud cost management. |
| Accurate AWS Billing Insights | With detailed usage and billing data, AWS CUR helps detect cloud spend anomalies, uncover inefficiencies, and inform decisions for cost optimization using AWS Savings Plans or Reserved Instances. |
| Optimized Cloud Budget Allocation | CUR enables teams to allocate cloud costs by project or department, improving financial visibility and accountability. Ideal for FinOps teams aiming for cloud budget optimization. |
| Seamless Integration with BI Tools | Easily analyze AWS billing data in Amazon Athena, QuickSight, or tools like Tableau and Power BI. Build custom cloud cost dashboards for real-time reporting and AWS spend forecasting. |
Common AWS CUR Use Cases
1. Cost Allocation & Internal Chargebacks
- Distribute AWS cloud expenses across departments, teams, or projects.
- Ensure accurate cloud chargeback and showback reporting.
- Enhance financial accountability by linking usage to responsible teams.
- Helps engineering and finance teams align budget with usage.
2. Usage Optimization
- Analyze granular CUR data to identify underutilized resources (e.g., EC2, EBS volumes).
- Highlight idle cloud assets that can be rightsized or terminated.
- Drive cloud cost optimization by improving resource efficiency.
3. Cost Anomaly Detection
- Detect unexpected spikes in cloud costs that may signal misconfigurations or security breaches.
- Set up alerts or scripts to monitor CUR data for anomalies.
- Prevent budget overruns and reinforce cloud financial governance.
4. Custom Billing Dashboards
- Use CUR data with tools like Amazon QuickSight, Athena, or Power BI.
- Build interactive cost dashboards to visualize spending trends.
- Enable real-time AWS cost monitoring and reporting.
- Support strategic decisions with data-driven insights into cloud usage.
Setting Up the AWS CUR – Step-By-Step
Before you access your AWS reports, you need to configure AWS CUR to publish your billing reports to one of your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Once you’ve done that, you can access your organization’s Cost and Usage Reports via the AWS Management Console.
Here’s how you can get started with AWS CUR:
Step 1: Navigate to the reports page
To begin creating a CUR, navigate to your AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. With AWS’s recent updates, CUR is now grouped under the “Data Exports” section.
You can locate and access “Data Exports” on the left navigation pane and then select “Cost and usage dashboard”.
Step 2: Configure your new report
Choose a custom name for your report that you’ll remember when extracting your data later. You’ll then have the option to select “Include resource IDs” to create additional line items for each applicable resource to make reporting more transparent.
Step 3: Enable updates at regular intervals
Decide on your report data refresh preferences and whether or not you want the CUR formatted by hourly, daily, or monthly consumption.
You’ll also have the option to enable report versioning. This setting will allow you to either overwrite the previous reports or continue to compile new reports as they’re available.
Step 4: Set up your cloud storage
Under the “Data export storage settings” section, click “Configure” to customize your S3 storage bucket.
You can select an existing bucket to use or create a new one. When creating a new bucket, enter a custom name and decide on the region.
After selecting the new bucket region, review the default policies applied, then click “Save.”
Step 5: Review and generate your report
After filling in the necessary details, select “Create Report”. This will generate your new report. It can take up to 24 hours for your report to show up in your assigned S3 bucket.
The length of time to generate your report will depend on the number of separate line item settings you enable. Hourly reporting will also take much longer to generate than monthly summaries 🎉.
Are AWS Cost and Usage Reports Free🤔?
AWS CUR itself is free, but storing and querying CUR data (e.g., via S3, Athena, or Redshift) may incur costs.
Limitations and Shortcomings of the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
1. Large Data Volume
- AWS CUR generates highly detailed billing reports, especially in large or multi-account AWS environments.
- These CSV files can be massive in size, often requiring scalable data storage and cost-effective data pipelines.
2. Complex File Format
- CUR files come in a multi-column, semi-relational format with hundreds of columns.
- Interpreting CUR requires knowledge of AWS billing taxonomy, SQL querying, and BI tools.
- Without technical expertise, extracting insights can be time-consuming and error-prone.
3. Delayed Data Availability
- CUR data is not available in real-time;Reports are updated periodically, often with a delay of several hours or more
- This delay makes CUR unsuitable for immediate cost monitoring or real-time anomaly detection.
- Organizations often complement CUR with tools like AWS Cost Explorer, CloudWatch, or Budgets for real-time alerts and spend control.
4. Lack of Forecasting Capabilities
- AWS CUR provides only historical billing and usage data.
- It does not support predictive modeling, budget forecasting, or spend trend analysis out of the box.
- Businesses need to integrate additional forecasting tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer, to project future expenses.
Conclusion
AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) empower businesses with deep financial insights. While CUR requires careful setup and analysis, it provides unparalleled transparency into AWS spending, making cost optimization more effective.
Start leveraging AWS CUR today to take control of your cloud costs!