What does AWS Cost Explorer do?

AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool designed to help users visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows users to analyze their spending patterns and gain insights into their AWS financial data. With Cost Explorer, you can create custom reports, filter costs by different dimensions such as service type or resource tags, and identify cost trends over specific periods. This capability to visualize and analyze costs is essential for organizations to optimize their cloud spending, budget effectively, and make informed decisions regarding their AWS resources.

By using Cost Explorer, businesses can track their historical spending and forecast future costs, making it an invaluable tool for financial management within the AWS cloud environment. This comprehensive analysis helps users to pinpoint areas where spending could be optimized, ensuring that resource management aligns with budgetary goals.

Other options don't align with the specific purpose of Cost Explorer. Monitoring security settings or tracking user activity, while important, pertains to AWS services focused on security and activity monitoring rather than cost management. Automating the reduction of costs by shutting down unused resources suggests a function that would typically require other tools or manual intervention rather than directly relating to cost visualization and management, which is the core function of Cost Explorer.