Level 200: Cost Anomaly Detection

Authors

• Bilal Shuja, Technical Account Manager.
• Jerry Chen, Solutions Architect, AWS Well-Architected.

Contributors

• Jang Whan Han, Solutions Architect, AWS Well-Architected.
• Ben Mergen, Sr Cost Lead SA WA.

Feedback

If you wish to provide feedback on this lab, there is an error, or you want to make a suggestion, please email: costoptimization@amazon.com

Well-Architected Best Practices

This lab helps you to exercise the following Well-Architected Best Practices:

• COST01-BP03 - Establish cloud budgets and forecasts
• COST01-BP05 - Report and notify on cost optimization

Introduction

With AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, reduce cost surprises and enhance control without slowing innovation. This hands-on lab will guide you through the steps to configure AWS Cost Anomaly Detection in your AWS account. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is an AWS Cost Management feature that leverages advanced Machine Learning technologies to identify unusual spends by continuously monitoring your cost and usage. Based on selected spend segments, Cost Anomaly Detection automatically determines daily patterns by adjusting for organic growth and seasonal trends. It triggers an alert when spend seems abnormal based on your resource usage pattern. This lab will walk you through the steps to analyze these alerts and investigate the root cause.

Goals:

• Setting up anomaly detection by creating monitors and an alert subscription.
• Analyzing unusual spends detected by Cost Anomaly Detection and investigating the root cause.

Prerequisites:

• AWS Account Setup has been completed

As an alternative, an existing AWS account can be used to run this workshop.

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a feature within Cost Explorer. To access AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, Cost Explorer must be enabled. For instructions on how to enable Cost Explorer using the console, see Enabling Cost Explorer. Customers enabling Cost Explorer on or after March 27, 2023, will automatically have a default configuration of AWS Cost Anomaly Detection that monitors the spend by AWS service, and emails a daily summary report when a cost anomaly above a certain threshold is detected. For more details, refer to New Cost Explorer users now get Cost Anomaly Detection by default.

For a multi-account AWS environment, Cost Anomaly Detection needs to be set up in the management account to analyze cost across the entire AWS Organizations and alert on anomalies for each linked account.

• An IAM user or an IAM role in your AWS account with full access to AWS Cost Explorer and Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS) is required.

Costs

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection service is free to use. The only applicable charges are SNS topic subscriptions which will be charged at the SNS rates. Customers that opt for email alerts have no associated costs.

Steps:

• Getting to know AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
• Create A Cost Monitor
• Dive deep into detected cost anomaly
• Creating additional alert subscription for individual alerts
• Teardown