Overview of the Amazon Q cost analysis capability - AWS Cost Management
Supported Cost Explorer features and dimensionsExamples of types of questions supportedGetting startedPricing

Overview of the Amazon Q cost analysis capability

Amazon Q's cost analysis capability is in preview and can make mistakes. Please verify your cost data with AWS Cost Explorer. Use the thumb icon in Amazon Q to provide feedback and help us improve.

Amazon Q’s cost analysis capability is a feature of Amazon Q that works with Cost Explorer. With the cost analysis capability in Amazon Q, you can ask questions about your AWS costs and receive answers in natural language that reflect the actual historical costs of your AWS services. Amazon Q’s cost analysis capability uses generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to interpret your question and then requests the relevant cost data from Cost Explorer. Because LLMs are not well-suited to mathematical operations, Amazon Q instead uses traditional computing for all calculations on your cost data. With each response, Amazon Q provides transparency on the parameters that were used to retrieve your cost data, as well as a link to a matching visualization in the Cost Explorer console.

For example, if you ask Amazon Q a question such as “What services did I spend the most on last month?”, Amazon Q might return a response similar to the following:

The AWS services with the highest costs for your account last month were:

  1. Amazon Relational Database Service: $2,595.55 (36.65% of total cost)

  2. EC2 - Other: $1,222.71 (17.26% of total cost)

  3. Amazon QuickSight: $1,006.32 (14.21% of total cost)

  4. Amazon OpenSearch Service: $695.07 (9.81% of total cost)

  5. Amazon ElastiCache: $482.11 (6.81% of total cost)

  6. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing: $269.05 (3.80% of total cost)

  7. AWS Supply Chain: $208.32 (2.94% of total cost)

  8. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service: $148.80 (2.10% of total cost)

  9. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud: $141.50 (2.00% of total cost)

  10. AWS Glue: $67.57 (0.95% of total cost)

The following Cost Explorer parameters were used to answer your question:

  • Date range: 2024-03-01 through 2024-03-31 (inclusive)

  • Granularity: "MONTHLY"

  • Group-by dimensions: "Service"

  • Filter: Excludes charge types “Refund”, “Credit”

  • Metric: "UnblendedCosts"

If the response isn’t immediately useful, you can ask follow-up questions to expand on the initial response. Amazon Q’s cost analysis capability looks at your entire conversation history to create follow-up responses.

Supported Cost Explorer features and dimensions

You can ask questions about the historical cost data that is available in Cost Explorer, using most common dimensions of cost data:

  • Service (for example, Amazon Simple Storage Service)

  • Charge type (for example, usage, tax, refund)

  • Linked account

  • AWS Region

  • Instance type (for example, c7g.xlarge)

  • Instance family (for example, compute-optimized)

  • Purchase type (for example, on-demand, Savings Plans, spot)

  • Platform (for example, Windows, Linux)

  • Tenancy (shared or dedicated)

  • Availability Zone

Amazon Q’s cost analysis capability cannot provide forecast information, responses with resource-level granularity (regarding specific EC2 instances, for example), costs by tag or cost category, or usage quantities. The following dimensions available in Cost Explorer are not available using the cost analysis capability in Amazon Q (preview):

  • Usage type

  • Billing entity

  • Operation

  • Database engine

  • Operating system

  • Savings Plan ARN

  • Legal entity name

  • Reservation ID

  • Deployment option

  • Cache engine

  • Savings Plans type

  • Invoicing entity

Examples of types of questions supported

  • How much did I spend last month?

  • Were any credits applied to our September bill?

  • What were my cost trends by Region over the last three months?

  • What were the top five highest-cost linked accounts in Q1?

  • What instance type had the highest increase from February to March?

  • What AWS service increased the most in February?

  • Which Availability Zone had the highest costs last month?

  • What were my costs by day last week?

  • What was the cost of running c5.xlarge Linux instances last quarter?

Getting started

To use the cost analysis capability in Amazon Q, you must first opt in to Cost Explorer. To opt in to Cost Explorer, open the Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/costmanagement/home. Once you’ve opted in to Cost Explorer, it can take up to 24 hours for your cost data to be available.

To start a conversation with Amazon Q

  1. Log in to the AWS Management Console at https://console.aws.amazon.com.

  2. Choose the Amazon Q icon on the right side of the console.

Pricing

There are no additional charges for using the cost analysis capability in Amazon Q. For information about Amazon Q Developer pricing, see Amazon Q Developer pricing.