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Replacing the Detailed Billing Report with the Cost and Usage Report

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is how AWS provides a comprehensive dataset of the usage in your AWS environment. It replaces the now-deprecated Detailed Billing Reports (DBR) technology.

note

This guidance assumes you're subscribed only to the Cost & Compliance module of Stax. If your AWS accounts are Stax-managed, Stax takes care of this for you.

Configure the CUR​

If your AWS Organization's management account (or any other account that incurs a bill you've got linked to Stax) predates the DBR deprecation in August of 2019, you may need to create the CUR for your account. AWS provides detailed guidance on this process. While following the guidance, ensure that you apply the following settings to make best use of Stax's capabilities:

  • On the Report contentpage:

    • Choose Include resource IDs to include the IDs of each individual resource in the report
    • For Data refresh settings, enable automatic data refreshes

  • For Report path prefix, there is no need to specify a specific value. AWS typically recommends using the format of cur-<management-account-id>

  • For Time granularity, choose hourly

  • For Report versioning, choose to overwrite the previous version of the report if desired. This is a supported configuration and can help to save on S3 costs

  • There is no requirement to enable integration for Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon QuickSight, though you may enable those if you wish to utilize them

  • Choose the gzip compression method type

Once the report is created, you'll be able to configure it to be consumed by Stax.

FAQs​

Do I need to disable the DBR?​

No, you don't need to stop using the DBR, though you can if desired. As the DBR is stored in S3, you may see a minor cost saving by disabling it.

Do I need to update all my AWS accounts to use the CUR?​

You'll need to update any accounts you wish to use with Stax that generate billing data. That means they are either: AWS organization management accounts, or AWS accounts that are not part of an organization.