Written By: Ranjeeth Kuppala, Former CTO, Powerupcloud Technologies. TL;DR version. Loaded AWS detailed billing reports to BigQuery. Generic Queries are available here in this repo. Pull requests welcome. Redash was used to visualize.

AWS default billing and cost management dashboard is already pretty informative. The cost explorer allows analyzing the data by custom date ranges, grouping by select services etc. But there are much deeper insights hiding in your detailed billing reports if you know where to look. Example, you find that there is a sudden spike in data transfer-out costs. Did someone took control of your Jenkins server and using it for bitcoin mining? Or was it a legitimate usage? How do you identify which resource is causing the spike? With detailed billing reports loaded to a database, finding answers to questions like these and much more is just a few simple SQL queries away.

At any given point, we manage not less than 50 AWS accounts of varying sizes for our clients. Looking at the frequent questions related to billing that we deal with, we set out building custom dashboards that refresh every day with the latest billing data using ReDash.

This post explains loading a sample report to BigQuery and some sample queries are included.