As a best pratice, we recommend you enable Cost and Usage Report in your AWS Accounts. This will ensure that you have a copy of your comprehensive AWS usage data. Though there is no additional charge for enabling this report; you will be paying standard S3 storage rates for the bucket that holds this data.
You have to perform these steps on the payer/management account using the root user or an IAM user with Admin and Billing privileges.
Please follow these instructions to see whether they are already enabled.
You can use any name for the bucket, report name and prefix path. DoiT prefers the following values. If you are instructed by your DoiT contact to use other values, please use those.
Bucket Name: [YOUR_COMPANY_NAME]-aws-billing (If you get an error message stating bucket name already exists, add a "-1" suffix to the name)
Report Name: aws-usage-report
Prefix: billing
After logging into the AWS Console, navigate to this page and click on "Create Report".
Make sure you check the setting "Include Resource Ids" and "Automatically Refresh.."
In the next page, we recommend you create a new S3 bucket with proper permissions to store the CUR files. Click on "Configure" to walk through these options.
You can select the option of "Create a bucket" and input the name and region.
In the next step, you can confirm the recommended policy to the new bucket
After pop-up window closes, make sure the other settings are as following.
In the next page, you can verify the settings and click "Review and Complete".
Going forward, you will get Cost and Usage Report in the bucket you configured. It can take up to 24 hours for AWS to start delivering reports to your Amazon S3 bucket. After delivery starts, AWS updates the AWS Cost and Usage Reports files at least once a day.
After 24 hours have passed, you will have the first Cost and Usage Report in your S3 bucket. But, this will be for the current date onwards. AWS can backfill this for past dates, but you need to file a Support Ticket. Please peform following steps.
In AWS Console, navigate to the Support Page, click on "Create Case", Select the following options.
In the next page, Use "CUR file backfilling" for the subject and following text for description. You should mention the beginning date and end dates for the backfill. Mention previous month as the end date. The beginning date can be a month/year three years prior to the previous month.
Hello,
I've just recently enabled CUR files in my account. Can you please have this backfilled for previous dates?
report name: <Use-your-report-name-from-above>
dates: YYYY/MM - YYYY/MM
Thanks in advance.
In the next page, you can select any of the options for "contact us". We recommend you click "Web" and add your DoiT contacts in the "Additional Contacts" field. AWS Support Team will get back to you with in 12 hours. Backfilling process usually takes a few days.
You can verify this in AWS Console, by browsing to S3 and clicking on the bucket-name you gave while following above steps. The bucket name we recommended above was [YOUR_COMPANY_NAME]-aws-billing
You should see a folder called "report" and inside that you will see a folder called "aws-usage-report". Browse to that folder and you should see a folder for each month the report is backfilled for.
If the folders are there, the report files should be present. But, if you would like to see the actual report files, you can pick a folder for a month and click on it. Within the month folders, there will be a subfolders with an id. This is the manifest-id of the report and there can be mulitple versions of report for a month. Inside these folders, you will find the actual report data in .gz format.
