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Cost Explorer

Cost Explorer lets you filter, group, and drill into cloud spend across any combination of provider, account, service, region, tag, and business perspective.

When to use it

  • You received an unexpected bill or budget alert and need to find the cause.
  • You want to understand which services, accounts, or teams are driving spend.
  • You need to prepare data for a cost report or chargeback reconciliation.
  • You are comparing spend between two time periods, regions, or environments.

Open Cost Explorer

Go to Cost Management > Cost Explorer from product navigation.

Analyze spend

1. Set the date range and granularity

Select a date range and choose Daily, Weekly, or Monthly granularity. Narrower ranges with daily granularity are best for investigating a spike; monthly granularity is better for trend analysis.

2. Choose a Group By dimension

Group By Use it to
Provider Compare spend across AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.
Account / Subscription / Project See spend per cloud account
Service Find top services by cost
Region Identify regional spend distribution
Tag Break down by team, environment, or cost center tag
Perspective View spend mapped to business teams or products

3. Apply filters

Narrow results using Providers, Accounts, Regions, Services, Cost Type, Pricing Model, and Charge Type. Use the advanced filter expression builder for provider-specific fields or tag-based filtering: select a provider, choose a field or tag key, select values, and apply.

4. Review and drill in

Review the chart and table together. Click any row to open a detail page:

  • Account detail — cost breakdown for the selected cloud account
  • Service detail — cost breakdown for the selected service
  • Asset detail — spend and configuration for an individual resource

5. Export

Use the Export action to download cost data for offline analysis. Always record the date range, granularity, cost type, and currency alongside exported figures.

Tips

  • Start broad, then add one filter at a time to isolate the cause of a change.
  • Use Perspectives filter only after confirming Perspective rules cover the accounts and tags in scope.
  • Reset all filters when a query unexpectedly returns zero results.
  • For chargeback reconciliation, use the same cost type and date range as in your allocation report.

Troubleshooting