Cloudsoft Spotlight - Solve the mystery of your AWS bill with CUR 2.0
What is the CUR and why should I use it?
The Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is arguably one of the most under-appreciated tools within the ongoing plethora of services offered by AWS. The CUR allows you to retrieve fine grained data on services, pricing, usage types of billing dimensions. No matter your role - engineer, finance or ops - if you need serious cost insights in AWS, CUR should be the go-to tool for clarity and control.
But as with everything AWS, things are forever changing, so its advisable to keep up.
CUR 2.0
As of November 2023, AWS released the Cost and Usage Report 2.0. This is the CUR 1.0’s taller and more handsome younger brother which boasts a new consistent schema, nested data & additional columns. You can read more about the features updated in the CUR 2.0 documentation provided by AWS.
How do I configure the CUR 2.0?
Setting up the CUR 2.0 can be as simple as following the instructions. But at a high level the configuration looks a lot like,
Can I backfill CUR 2.0 Data?
As a result of setting up the CUR 2.0 there will more than likely be the need to retrieve historical data for reporting purposes. Fear not, AWS can backfill up to 36 months of historical cost data (for free) with a support ticket raised like this one.
It’s also worth a mention that the first set of CUR 2.0 will take anywhere up to 24 hours to become present in the destination S3 bucket.
How do I analyse CUR 2.0 Data?
AWS documentation often directs you toward their paid service, QuickSight. And while QuickSight is a great tool (no complaints there!) There is a first approach that’s more cost-effective and worth considering. Which is probably why you’re here in the first place, right?
You can jump right in and start using Athena directly on top of your CUR 2.0 data. Athena is a powerful, serverless query service that lets you run standard SQL queries seamlessly over your S3 data. And to make things even easier, the CUR Query Library provides a solid set of baseline queries to help you get started. Instead of building queries from scratch, you can leverage these pre-built queries to quickly extract insights into your AWS spending patterns.
If you're a fan of visual dashboards and don’t mind the extra cost, Cloud Intelligence Dashboards from AWS Well-Architected Labs are a fantastic choice. These dashboards leverage Amazon QuickSight to create interactive, visually rich reports that provide deep insights into your AWS spending patterns.
FOCUS
In addition to the CUR 2.0, there is FOCUS (Flexible Optimization and Cost Usage Savings). FOCUS is an open source standard that’s optimized for finance teams and individuals who need simplified cost visibility and budget insights without deep technical analysis. You can use data exports to produce FOCUS formatted reports which provide high-level insights into spending trends, cost optimization opportunities, and savings recommendations. Unlike the CUR 2.0, which offers granular, resource-level cost data, FOCUS aggregates cost information at the service and account level.
In conclusion, the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is an invaluable tool for managing and optimizing your AWS expenses. By leveraging this data with powerful services like Amazon Athena and Cloud Intelligence Dashboards, you can bring your cost insights to life, identify inefficiencies, and solve those pesky cost mysteries more effectively.
Cloudsoft Spotlight for AWS
If you have reached here as part of Cloudsoft Spotlight, it indicates that we found that you weren’t making use of the Cost and Usage report data available and we would recommend getting this configured. Please contact Cloudsoft if you need support for this.
This post is part of our Spotlight series where Cloudsoft experts use advanced tooling to look across your AWS estate for opportunities to optimize cost, increase security and take advantage of the latest innovations in AWS. We let you focus on your business objectives by ensuring you use AWS effectively.