Review billing dashboard and set up a billing alarm to avoid paying too much for AWS

Review an AWS bill in order to understand which service are you being charged for

Use AWS Billing & Cost Management Dashboard to keep your AWS bill to minimum

Even though AWS has a lot of services we can use within a free tier, sometimes an unexpected charge may occur. It's applicable not only for free tier, for instance you may notice that your AWS bill is way bigger this month than it was in the last one.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to review the AWS bill in order to understand which service are you being charged for and why.

Instructor: [0:00] When you are learning how to use AWS, you may want to stay within the free tier, but nevertheless, sometimes a charge may occur that you were not expecting, and you would like to know why your AWS bill is non-zero.

[0:12] In order to review our billing, let's go to services and search for billing, just in case. In order to review your billing and cost management dashboard, you have to be logged in as your root user of your AWS account. That is the user that you used in order to create the account in the first place.

[0:27] Because I'm logged in as a different user, I am not going to be able to see this dashboard. I'm going to go ahead and log in as my root user. Now, I'm logged in as the root user. Let me go ahead and click on billing in order to access the billing dashboard.

[0:39] We can see over here that, even though I tried to stay within the free tier on this account, I was actually charged one cent this month for my AWS account. I would like to understand what exactly am I paying for.

[0:51] I can see over here in the Month-to-Date Spend by Service Dashboard, that this month I got billed one cent for an EC2 service. In order to understand what exactly are you paying for within your AWS bill, go ahead and click on Bill Details.

[1:04] Here, we can see the summary of my AWS bill for this month. I am expected to pay one cent. Everything was free apart for the Elastic Compute Cloud which was EC2. I can see over here that I used to have an EC2 Instance, which I was actually billed for.

[1:18] In order to understand whether you are close to going out of the free tier, in the Billing & Cost Management Dashboard, you can scroll down a bit in order to see the top free tier services by users table. Here, you can review whether you are about to go out of the free tier on a certain service.

[1:34] As we can see over here, that I am not close to going out of the free tier for the most services I use on this account. For instance, for AWS Lambda, I am well within the free tier with only .03 percent requests sent to AWS Lambda service.

Course

Use AWS Billing & Cost Management Dashboard to keep your AWS bill to minimum

Review an AWS bill in order to understand which service are you being charged for

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