A city controller needs to chart last quarter’s AWS charges broken down by service to explain the bill to council. Which tool is designed for that historical analysis?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Want a chart of what you already spent by service last quarter? Open Cost Explorer. The Pricing Calculator is for future estimates, not the autopsy of last month’s bill.
Full Explanation
A city controller who needs to chart last quarter's AWS charges broken down by service to explain the bill to council should use AWS Cost Explorer, which visualizes and filters historical cost and usage. Cost Explorer is built for retrospective analysis: by service, account, Region, and tag dimensions that help translate a technical bill into a civic narrative for elected officials.
AWS Pricing Calculator alone builds forward-looking estimates; it is not the historical bill charting tool. Amazon CloudFront invalidation clears cached objects and does not analyze bills. AWS Snowmobile migrates exabyte-scale data and does not chart spend. Estimation, CDN ops, and physical migration distractors fail the historical analysis requirement.
Exam caveat: Past spend visualization → Cost Explorer; future estimate → Pricing Calculator; alerts → Budgets; line-item export → Cost and Usage Report. Council explanation of last quarter → Cost Explorer.
Operational check for the controller: open Cost Explorer for the prior quarter, group by service, filter to relevant linked accounts, export charts for the council packet, reconcile large line items with application owners, and enable cost allocation tags beforehand so next quarter's story can split parks versus police cleanly.