AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a single solution that enables users to access information on their cloud costs and resource usage. With AWS CUR, users can publish their billing reports to an Amazon S3 bucket. The CUR report breaks down cost by product or product resource and by the hour, day, or month. The report in the bucket is updated once daily in a CSV format or Parquet format, according to your settings.
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Users can enable AWS CUR on the CUR page in the Billing Console. Best practice is to turn on versioning for the S3 bucket to avoid data loss. Users can view the report on Microsoft Excel, Apache OpenOffice, or any other spreadsheet software.
The CUR CSV file includes the following columns.
Users can experience the following benefits from using AWS Cost and Usage Reports:
A CUR can be set up by a standalone account if you use the consolidated billing. It is important to be aware that the designated Amazon S3 bucket that receives billing reports must be owned by the payer account in the organization. Users will not be able to receive billing reports in a bucket owned by a member account. Organizations using consolidated billing can also have the course broken down by member account.
AWS CUR generates a detailed spreadsheet that can help organizations to analyze better and understand their costs. This data is compatible with Athena, which allows users to turn the report into a queryable database, or they can use QuickSight to visualize the billing data as graphs.
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