SAA-C03 - Design Cost-Optimized Architectures - Section 4.7

Monitor and govern cost using AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and cost allocation tags.

Use AWS Cost Explorer to visualise historical spend by service, account, tag, or region, and configure AWS Budgets to alert when actual or forecasted spend exceeds a threshold. Apply cost allocation tags so spend is attributable to teams, projects, or environments, and enable the AWS Cost and Usage Report for granular billing data you can query in Athena.

AWS Cost ExplorerAWS BudgetsCost allocation tagsAWS Cost and Usage Report

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleDesign Cost-Optimized Architectureseasy

A data engineering team needs the most granular billing data AWS can provide, with hourly line items for every resource and usage type, delivered automatically to Amazon S3 so the team can load it into Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight for custom cost analysis. The built-in console views do not expose enough detail for the queries they want to run. Which AWS feature should the architect enable?

  • AEnable cost allocation tags and export the activated tag list to Amazon S3 so the team can load the most granular hourly line items into Athena and QuickSight.
  • BEnable AWS Budgets reports and have them delivered to Amazon S3 so the team can load the most granular hourly line items into Athena and QuickSight for analysis.
  • CEnable the AWS Cost and Usage Report delivered to Amazon S3 so the team can load the most granular hourly line items into Athena and QuickSight for analysis. Correct
  • DSchedule AWS Cost Explorer exports to Amazon S3 so the team can load the most granular hourly line items into Athena and QuickSight for their custom analysis.
The AWS Cost and Usage Report delivers the most granular hourly line-item billing data to S3 for analysis in Athena and QuickSight. Custom, query-driven cost analysis needs the finest billing detail. The AWS Cost and Usage Report is the most granular dataset AWS provides, writing hourly line items for every resource and usage type to an S3 bucket where tools such as Athena and QuickSight can query and visualise it, which the summarised console views cannot match.

Why A is wrong: Cost allocation tags only add labelling dimensions to cost data and do not by themselves produce hourly line-item files in S3, so they cannot supply the granular dataset the team needs to query.

Why B is wrong: Budgets reports summarise spend against thresholds and lack hourly resource-level line items, so the dataset delivered would be far too coarse for the custom queries the team intends to run.

Why C is correct: The Cost and Usage Report is the most detailed billing dataset, with hourly per-resource line items written to S3 and ready for Athena and QuickSight, which is precisely the granular custom analysis requested.

Why D is wrong: Cost Explorer is an interactive console with summarised data and limited exports, so it does not deliver the hourly resource-level line items to S3 that the team requires for detailed querying.

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