Section 4.3 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

This series is intended to be a personal study guide. Information may not be comprehensive or accurate. I am sharing it in case others find it useful. Please feel free to comment if any information is inaccurate.

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4.3 Identify resources available for billing support

Identify ways to get billing support and information

• Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Amazon QuickSight, third-party partners, and AWS Marketplace tools
  • Cost Explorer - AWS service for reports/visualizations analyzing cost and usage data
  • AWS Cost and Usage Report
    • Comprehensive set of cost and usage data
    • Deliver report files to your Amazon S3 bucket
    • Update the report up to three times a day
    • Create, retrieve, and delete your reports using the AWS CUR API Reference
  • Amazon QuickSight
    • AWS BI tool, can ingest data from the Cost and Usage report
    • Ingest the Cost and Usage Report into Amazon QuickSight
  • Third-party partners (not sure what to put here)
  • AWS Marketplace tools
    • Paying for products
    • Billed at end of month for resources used
• Open a billing support case
  • Must be root user or have IAM permission to open case
  • Go to Support Center, create case, choose "Account and billing support"
• The role of the Concierge for AWS Enterprise Support Plan customers
  • 24/7 technical support
  • Account experts who specialize in working with enterprise accounts
  • Quickly and efficiently assist with billing and account inquiries
  • Help implement billing and account best practices

Identify where to find pricing information on AWS services

• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
• AWS Services product pages - each page outlines pricing for the service
• AWS Pricing API - returns JSON or CSV with pricing information in bulk or for specific services

Recognize that alarms/alerts exist

• Creating a billing alarm - sends an alert when charges exceed an amount that you specify
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection - uses machine learning to analyze costs on the account
• AWS CloudWatch anomaly detection - uses machine learning to analyze performance and behavior of architecture components

Identify how tags are used in cost allocation

• Using Cost Allocation Tags
• AWS uses cost allocation tags to organize resource costs on cost allocation report
• AWS generated tags - defined, created, and applied by AWS
• User-defined tags - defined, created, and applied by users
• AWS and user tags must be activated and applied separately
• Resources tagged with an application name can be used to track costs for the whole application

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