A holding company runs about 300 AWS accounts. Finance wants monthly chargeback reports grouped by a cost center label, and alerts when daily spend suddenly rises. Which combination is MOST appropriate?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: D
A user-defined tag appears in billing data only after it is activated as a cost allocation tag. Cost Explorer then groups and filters spend by that tag, which supports showback and chargeback reporting. Cost Anomaly Detection watches for unusual spending patterns and sends alerts when spend departs from its expected pattern. AWS Budgets can add threshold alarms if finance wants fixed limits. Trusted Advisor offers recommendations rather than allocation reports. Macie discovers sensitive data in S3 and has no role in cost analysis.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Trusted Advisor flags opportunities such as idle or underused resources. It does not allocate spend to departments or raise anomaly alerts based on tagged spend, so it cannot deliver chargeback.
- B. Account restructuring can map cost to teams, but it ignores the stated need for label-based reporting across shared workloads. It also provides no alerting on unusual spend and would be a large, disruptive change.
- C. Macie discovers and classifies sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. It has no billing analysis, showback or spend anomaly capability and cannot produce cost reports.