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About Cost

warning
This module is being shut down in March 2025. See Shutdown of Cost and Compliance Modules for more information.

Use the Cost module in Stax to explore your AWS usage in detail. You can see your daily, weekly, or monthly usage for the past 3 years, broken down by usage code, service, account, or region, and see your trends and change over time. If you've added budgets, you can easily see how you're tracking against them.

Cost & Compliance Dashboard​

The Cost & Compliance Dashboard allows for a high level review of usage tracking within your AWS Organization(s). The Dashboard page displays organization-wide tiles showing estimated usage this month, daily run rate for the last 30 days, estimated wastage for the current month, and compliance against configured Organization Rules. Clicking on any tile will take you to a more detailed breakdown of that data elsewhere in the Cost module.

Beneath the tiles is the Comparative View which allows selecting a View and reviewing metrics for each segment of that view:

  • Spend so far this month (represented as usage cost)
  • Estimated spend this month (represented as usage cost)
  • A sparkline representing daily run rate for the last 30 days
  • Wastage this month, by usage cost and percentage of total usage
  • Organization Rules compliance

Cost Module​

The Cost module supports detailed investigation into the costs associated with your organization's AWS consumption. It consists of four pages:

  • Cost Dashboard provides a detailed view of both usage cost and financial cost of AWS consumption
  • Wastage provides detailed insights into the organization's perceived wastage in AWS, which allows for reduction or optimization in spend
  • Savings Plans & RIs presents the following features:
    • visualizations representing the AWS Savings Plans your organization has purchased, and how they are applied to your consumption across the AWS Organization; and
    • analysis around EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs), including coverage of existing RIs, and recommendations for future RI purchases.

Pages within the Cost module can be filtered using Global Filters to restrict the view of data to a specific segment within a View.

tip

As AWS consumption costs are universally defined in $USD, all costs represented within Stax are represented as $USD.

How cost is represented in Stax​

Stax offers Usage Mode and Financial Mode to allow costs to be shown in a way that is useful for you. See Understanding Financial Mode for more detail on the two modes.