What should a solutions architect do to meet this requirement MOST cost-effectively?
Use Cost Explorer to create a daily report of costs by service. Filter the report by EC2 instances. Configure Cost Explorer to send an Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) notification when a threshold is exceeded.
Use Cost Explorer to create a monthly report of costs by service. Filter the report by EC2 instances. Configure Cost Explorer to send an Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) notification when a threshold is exceeded.
Use AWS Budgets to create a cost budget for each account. Set the period to monthly. Set the scope to EC2 instances. Set an alert threshold for the budget. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive a notification when a threshold is exceeded.
Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to create a report with hourly granularity. Integrate the report data with Amazon Athena. Use Amazon EventBridge to schedule an Athena query. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive a notification when a threshold is exceeded.
Explanations:
Cost Explorer does not send notifications directly; it requires integration with other services like Amazon SNS for alerts. Daily reports may not provide timely alerts if costs are tracked monthly.
Similar to Option A, Cost Explorer does not support direct notifications. Monthly reports may not offer the immediacy needed for threshold alerts, making it less effective for real-time monitoring.
AWS Budgets allows for the creation of cost budgets with alerts based on specified thresholds. It directly integrates with Amazon SNS for notifications, making it the most effective and cost-efficient solution for monthly usage tracking of EC2 instances.
While this option provides detailed hourly granularity, it involves a complex setup with Athena and EventBridge, which may incur additional costs and is not as straightforward as using AWS Budgets for simple threshold alerts.
I classify that the answer is:
Use AWS Budgets to create a cost budget for each account. Set the period to monthly. Set the scope to EC2 instances. Set an alert threshold for the budget. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive a notification when a threshold is exceeded.