Question #1257
A company operates several AWS accounts for different development teams and needs to monitor monthly Amazon EC2 spending in each account. They want to receive immediate notifications whenever the spending exceeds a predefined threshold. Which solution is the MOST cost-effective?
Use AWS Cost Explorer to generate a monthly cost report filtered by EC2 instances. Configure Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to send an alert when the threshold is exceeded.
Set up an AWS Budget for each account with a monthly period, scoped to EC2 costs. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to notify when the budget threshold is reached.
Create an AWS Lambda function that processes the AWS Cost and Usage Report data daily. Use Amazon EventBridge to trigger the Lambda function and send notifications via Amazon SNS if EC2 costs exceed the threshold.
Deploy an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard to track EC2 billing metrics and set up a CloudWatch alarm that triggers an SNS notification when the monthly spending surpasses the threshold.
Explanation
Answer B is correct because AWS Budgets is specifically designed for tracking costs against predefined thresholds and integrates natively with Amazon SNS for real-time alerts. It allows scoping budgets to EC2 costs per account, ensuring granular monitoring. Option A uses Cost Explorer, which lacks real-time alerts and requires manual report generation. Option C relies on delayed Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data and incurs additional Lambda/EventBridge costs. Option D is incorrect because CloudWatch does not natively track EC2-specific billing metrics across accounts without complex setup. AWS Budgets provides the simplest, most cost-effective solution for immediate alerts on EC2 spending thresholds.
Answer
The correct answer is: B