AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 513

A company observes an increase in Amazon EC2 costs in its most recent bill. The billing team notices unwanted vertical scaling of instance types for a couple of
EC2 instances. A solutions architect needs to create a graph comparing the last 2 months of EC2 costs and perform an in-depth analysis to identify the root cause of the vertical scaling.
How should the solutions architect generate the information with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Budgets to create a budget report and compare EC2 costs based on instance types.
• B. Use Cost Explorer's granular filtering feature to perform an in-depth analysis of EC2 costs based on instance types.
• C. Use graphs from the AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard to compare EC2 costs based on instance types for the last 2 months.
• D. Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to create a report and send it to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon QuickSight with Amazon S3 as a source to generate an interactive graph based on instance types.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Cost Explorer provides a built-in interface to visualize, group, and filter cost data over time by specific dimensions like instance type, making it the solution with the lowest operational overhead. AWS Budgets is designed for alerting rather than deep-dive analysis, and the default Billing dashboard lacks the granular filtering needed to isolate specific instance types. While using AWS Cost and Usage Reports with Amazon QuickSight is highly customizable, it introduces unnecessary complexity and operational overhead compared to Cost Explorer.