AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / Question #925 of 719

Question #925

A company needs to categorize its AWS costs by project, environment, and team while ensuring detailed resource organization and cost tracking. Which solution will fulfill these requirements?

A

Use AWS Organizations to group accounts by project, then enable AWS Budgets to monitor and alert on cost deviations.

B

Apply resource tags for project, environment, and team. Enable cost allocation tags in AWS Cost and Usage Reports for granular cost tracking.

C

Configure AWS Cost Explorer to generate custom reports filtered by project, environment, and team parameters.

D

Navigate to the AWS Billing Dashboard to manually categorize resources and export detailed consumption reports.

Explanation

Answer B is correct because:
- Resource tags enable labeling AWS resources with metadata (e.g., project, environment, team), allowing precise categorization.
- Cost allocation tags, when enabled in AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), make these tags visible in billing data, enabling granular cost tracking and reporting.

Why other options are incorrect:
- A: AWS Organizations groups accounts but lacks granular tagging for resources. AWS Budgets only monitors costs, not categorizes them.
- C: Cost Explorer can filter by tags, but tags must first be activated as cost allocation tags (via B) to appear in reports.
- D: Manual categorization in the Billing Dashboard is error-prone and not scalable.

Key points:
- Use resource tags for categorizing costs.
- Enable cost allocation tags in CUR to include tags in billing data.
- Tags are the AWS-recommended method for cost tracking by attributes like project, environment, or team.

Answer

The correct answer is: B