Cost Explorer – Monthly Vs Hourly Costs by AWS Service | Deep Dive.

A deep dive into AWS Cost Explorer - Monthly vs Hourly Costs by AWS Service.

Focus:

•        Tailored for DevOps / FinOps.

Breakdown:

•        Intro,
•        Enabling Hourly Granularity,
•        Steps-by-step setup from AWS console,
•        Viewing Monthly vs. Hourly Costs by AWS Service,
•        The Basics: Hourly vs Monthly,
•        What Hourly Cost by Service Tells,
•        What Monthly Cost by Service Tell,
•        How AWS Cost Explorer Shows These Views,
•        Sample Analyses,
•        Interpreting Spikes & Drops,
•        Combining Hourly + Monthly Views,
•        Professional Tips,
•        Insights.

Intro:

•        Cost explorer allows twtech to manage cloud costs, understand how its AWS spend behaves over time (hourly/MonthlY)… what services contribute most and what is critical to be cut-back.
•        AWS Cost Explorer gives therefore, provides a powerful ways to slice twtech usage and costs, especially by hourly and monthly views.
•        To view costs in Cost Explorer by AWS service on a monthly or hourly basis, twtech must first enable the hourly granularity feature (for hourly views), and then modify the report's time granularity setting.

Enabling Hourly Granularity

•        By default, Cost Explorer provides monthly and daily granularity for up to 14 months of data.
•        Hourly data must be explicitly enabled, is a paid feature, and is only available for the past 14 days. 

Steps-by-step setup from AWS console

      1     Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the Billing and Cost Management dashboard.
2.     In the navigation pane, under Cost Management, choose Cost Explorer, and then select Preferences.
3.     In the Cost Explorer Preferences, enable Hourly granularity.
4.     Once enabled, hourly data typically becomes available within 48 hours.

Viewing Monthly vs. Hourly Costs by AWS Service

After enabling the feature, twtech can adjust the view in your reports: 

1.     In the Cost Explorer navigation pane, choose Cost Explorer and then Reports (or access a pre-built report like Monthly costs by service).
2.     In the report parameters on the right side of the screen, find the Granularity option.
3.     Use the dropdown menu to select either Monthly, Daily, or Hourly to change how twtech costs would be aggregated.
4.     To ensure the costs are broken down by service, check the Group by option and select Service.
5.     Set the desired Date range using the calendar tool. Remember, hourly data is only available for the past 14 days. 

NB:

• This configuration allows twtech to monitor cost and usage patterns at a granular level (hourly for immediate analysis) or a broad level (monthly for long-term trends).

  The Basics: Hourly vs Monthly

Dimension		Hourly Cost	Monthly Cost
Granularity	High (per hour)		Low (per month)
Use Cases	Short-term peaks, autoscaling, spikes		Overall budgeting, trend tracking
Noise Level	High		Smoothed over time
Best For	Spot instances, Lambda invocations, autoscaling clusters		Monthly billing, budget forecasting

 What Hourly Cost by Service Tells

·       Hourly breakdown shows costs attributed to each AWS service in each hour of the day.

 Why It Matters

•         Detect spikes in cost due to scaling events, deployments, backups.
•         Understand daily patterns: e.g., high EC2 usage during business hours.
•         Identify abnormal activities: sudden Lambda execution surges at odd hours.
•         Spot unused/overprovisioned resources that bill continuously (e.g., unattached EBS volumes showing steady cost even at night).

 Good For

•         Dev/Test environments
•         Autoscaling behavior analysis
•         Real-time alerts
•         Short-term cost optimizations

 What Monthly Cost by Service Tell

·       Monthly view aggregates all costs incurred in a calendar month per service.

 Why It Matters

•         Budget tracking against planned spend
•         Compare month-over-month trends (growth, anomalies)
•         Evaluate impact of architectural changes (e.g., moving from on-prem to AWS)
•         Chargeback/showback to Org teams

 Good For

•         Forecasting & budgeting
•         Executive reporting
•         Long-term optimization planning

 How AWS Cost Explorer Shows These Views

1. Selecting the Time Granularity

In Cost Explorer:

•         Time unit = Hourly (Hourly granularity) – Shows cost per service broken out by hour
•         Time unit = Monthly (Daily/Monthly granularity) – Shows aggregated daily or monthly totals

NB:

• Hourly isn’t available for all time ranges — usually twtech chooses a shorter window (e.g., last 7/30 days).

2. Group By Service

•        twtech can group Cost Explorer chart by AWS Service to see how each contributes to the total in its chosen period.

3. Filtering

Apply filters such as:

•         Linked accounts
•         Regions
•         Tags (e.g., Environment: Production)
•         Usage types (Compute, Storage)

NB:

·       This gives deeper insight into service-level cost behavior.

 Sample Analyses

 Example 1: Hourly EC2 Cost Pattern

Scenario: twtech sees spikes every day at ~2 PM.

What to check:

•         Are new EC2 instances being launched for batch jobs,
•         Are autoscaling policies set too aggressively,
•         Is there a cron job triggering resource use.

Actionable Insight: Tune autoscaling thresholds or reschedule heavy tasks to off-peak hours.

 Example 2: Monthly S3 Cost Trend

Scenario: S3 cost jumps 40% month-over-month.

What to check:

•         Growth in stored data,
•         Transition rules not triggering,
•         Frequency of GET/PUT operations.

Actionable Insight: Review lifecycle policies, remove old/unused data, enable intelligent-tiering.

 Interpreting Spikes & Drops

 Spike in Hourly Cost

Common causes:

•         Sudden traffic surge
•         Deployment of larger instance types
•         Unintended autoscaling behavior

Fixes:

•         Right-size resources
•         Use scaling policies with cooldown periods
•         Spot pricing + savings plans

 Drop in Monthly Cost, But Still Large Hourly Spikes

This can mean:

•         Overall spend is lower, but specific tasks still expensive per hour.
•         Example: you switched to Fargate, which can cost more per runtime hour.

Fix: 

• Look at service mix; compute vs storage vs data transfer.

 Combining Hourly + Monthly Views

For advanced cost governance, combine both:

Strategy	Example Question
Hourly anomaly detection	What hours cause cost spikes vs expected baseline?
Monthly trend analysis	Is our database service cost trending upward permanently?
Optimizing autoscaling	Can we smooth hourly peaks to reduce next month’s total?
Team chargeback	Which team’s services cost the most per month?

Professional Tips

 Use Tags Everywhere

·       Tag all resources (env, app, team, cost center).

·       Cost Explorer can then show tag-filtered cost trends both hourly and monthly.

 Set Budgets & Alerts

Use AWS Budgets to send alerts when:

•         Daily spend exceeds threshold
•         Hourly trend breaks expected pattern

 Export Cost & Usage Reports (CUR)

• CUR gives detailed line items that can be processed in Athena/QuickSight for custom hourly and monthly reports.

 Combine with Cost Anomaly Detection

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection can send alerts for unusual hourly or monthly spikes.

 When to Use Each in Workflow

Team	Primary Focus	Preferred View
FinOps	Predict spend, budget reviews	Monthly
DevOps	Alerts, scaling efficiency	Hourly
Engineering Leadership	Roadmap impact	Monthly + trend
Cloud Architects	Resource planning	Both

Insights:

• A practical, step-by-step playbook to build specific AWS Cost Explorer charts for EC2 hourly vs monthly cost analysis.

AWS Cost Explorer Charts

EC2 Hourly vs Monthly Cost Analysis (Hands-On)

 Prerequisites

•         IAM access: ce:GetCostAndUsage, ce:GetDimensionValues
•         (Optional but strongly recommended): Cost Allocation Tags enabled
•         Linked accounts enabled (if using AWS Organizations)

CHART 1: EC2 Hourly Cost Trend (Spike & Autoscaling Analysis)

 Purpose

•         Detect cost spikes
•         Validate Auto Scaling behavior
•         Identify wasted always-on compute
•        Correlate cost with deployments or traffic

 How to Build (Console)

1.     Open AWS Cost Explorer

•    AWS Console → Billing → Cost Explorer

2.     Set Time Range

•    Last 7 days or Last 30 days
•    Hourly granularity works best ≤ 14–30 days

3.     Granularity

•    Hourly

4.     Chart Type

•    Stacked bar or Line

5.     Filter

•    Service → EC2 - Compute
•    (Optional) Region → us-east-2, etc.
•    (Optional) Linked Account

6.     Group By

•    Usage type (recommended)

or

•    Instance type (advanced tuning)

What twtech should See

•         Hour-by-hour EC2 spend
•         Cost behavior during:
•    Business hours vs off-hours
•    Scaling events
•    Batch jobs
•    Deployments

 How twtech Interprets the data

Pattern	Meaning	Action
Flat line 24/7	Always-on EC2	Consider Savings Plans or right-sizing
Daytime spikes	Auto Scaling	Tune min/max & cooldowns
Sudden single-hour jump	Deployment / batch job	Review launch configs
Night-time costs	Idle resources	Schedule shutdown

 Professional  Tip

Group by Usage Type to isolate:

•         BoxUsage:* → On-Demand EC2
•         SpotUsage:* → Spot instances
•         CPUCredits:* → T-class misuse

CHART 2: EC2 Monthly Cost Trend (Budget & Forecasting)

 Purpose

•         Track EC2 spend growth
•         Validate Savings Plans impact
•         Support budget reviews
•         Executive reporting

 How to Build

1.     Time Range

•    Last 6 months or Last 12 months

2.     Granularity

•    Monthly

3.     Chart Type

•    Bar chart

4.     Filter

•    Service → EC2 - Compute

5.     Group By

•    Purchase option (highly recommended)

What twtech should See

Monthly EC2 spend split by:

•         On-Demand
•         Savings Plan
•         Reserved Instances
•         Spot

 How twtech Interprets the data

Insight	What It Means
On-Demand dominates	Missing commitment coverage
RI/SP flat but usage grows	Under-coverage
Spot increasing	Cost optimization success
Month-over-month growth	Scale or inefficiency

 Optimization Actions

•         Buy Compute Savings Plans for baseline usage
•         Shift burst workloads to Spot
•         Right-size instance families

 CHART 3: EC2 Hourly Cost by Auto Scaling Group (ASG)

Requires cost allocation tags

 Purpose

•         Identify which services/apps drive cost
•         Detect misconfigured ASGs

 Build Steps

1.     Granularity

•    Hourly

2.     Filter

•    Service → EC2 - Compute

3.     Group By

•    Tag → AutoScalingGroupName
•    or Application, Service, Environment

 Interpretation

Pattern	Action
One ASG dominates	Tune that service first
Dev ASG costs at night	Add scheduled scaling
Prod ASG spikes	Revisit scaling policy

CHART 4: EC2 Cost per Environment (Dev / Test / Prod)

 Purpose

•         FinOps chargeback
•         Enforce environment hygiene
•         Leadership reporting

 Build Steps

1.     Granularity

o   Monthly

2.     Group By

o   Tag → Environment

3.     Filter

o   Service → EC2 - Compute

 Expected Results

Environment	Healthy Pattern
Prod	Highest, stable
Dev	Lower, spiky
Test	Minimal

 Red flag:

• Dev/Test close to Prod cost.

 CHART 5: EC2 Instance Type Cost Breakdown

 Purpose

•         Identify inefficient instance families
•         Validate Graviton adoption
•         Right-sizing analysis

 Build Steps

1.     Granularity

o   Monthly

2.     Group By

o   Instance type

3.     Filter

o   Service → EC2 - Compute

 Optimization Insights

Finding	Action
Heavy m5.xlarge	Consider m6g
Many small instances	Consolidate
Legacy families	Modernize

 Advanced: Hourly vs Monthly Combined Strategy

Role	Chart Focus
DevOps	Hourly spikes & scaling
FinOps	Monthly trends & commitments
Cloud Architect	Instance mix
Leadership	Monthly summary

 Next-Level (Highly Recommended)

1, Export Cost & Usage Report (CUR)

•         Store in S3
•         Query with Athena
•         Build custom dashboards in QuickSight

2, Cost Anomaly Detection

•         Detect abnormal hourly EC2 spikes
•         Email / SNS alerts

3, Automation

•         Trigger Lambda when hourly EC2 cost exceeds threshold 
•           Auto-scale down non-prod.