AWS Cost Explorer is one of the best cloud cost dashboards ever built. It's detailed, flexible, and free. You can filter by service, region, tag, and time period. You can create custom reports and save them.
And teams still miss their budgets every month.
This isn't an AWS problem. It's a dashboard problem. Dashboards are investigation tools, not prevention tools. Understanding the difference is the key to actually staying on budget.
The Pull vs. Push Problem
Dashboards are pull-based. You have to go to them. You have to log in, navigate to Cost Explorer, select the right filters, and interpret the data.
Budget prevention needs to be push-based. It needs to come to you — in Slack, in email, wherever you already are — with a clear signal about whether you need to act.
The gap between pull and push is where budgets get missed. Not because the data doesn't exist, but because no one looked at it in time.
The Interpretation Problem
Open AWS Cost Explorer right now. What do you see? A chart. Maybe a table. Numbers going up or down.
Now answer this: Are you on track for the month? Will you hit your budget? Is today's spend normal or abnormal?
Those questions require interpretation. You need to know your baseline, understand seasonal patterns, account for recent deployments, and calculate your monthly pace. Cost Explorer gives you raw data. It doesn't give you judgment.
This is why FinOps analysts exist — to interpret dashboard data and translate it into decisions. But most teams don't have a FinOps analyst. They have an engineering lead who checks Cost Explorer when someone asks about costs.
AWS Budgets: Better, But Not Enough
AWS Budgets is a step in the right direction. You set a monthly budget, and AWS alerts you when you hit 80%, 100%, or a custom threshold.
But AWS Budgets has limitations:
Monthly thresholds are too slow. If your budget is $10,000/month and you get an alert at $8,000 on day 25, you can adjust. If you get an alert at $8,000 on day 10, the damage is already severe. Monthly thresholds don't account for pace.
No anomaly detection. AWS Budgets doesn't know what "normal" looks like. It can't tell you that today's spend is 3x your typical Tuesday. It only knows absolute thresholds.
Alert fatigue. If your budget is set too tight, you get alerts every month. If it's set too loose, you never get alerted until it's too late. Finding the right threshold is a constant adjustment.
Single-provider view. AWS Budgets only covers AWS. If you're also spending on OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP, or Azure, you need separate monitoring for each — or you fly blind.
What Actually Prevents Budget Misses
Prevention requires three things dashboards don't provide:
1. Daily pace tracking. "At your current spend rate, you'll hit $12,000 this month. Your budget is $10,000." This pace-based signal is more useful than a threshold alert because it projects the future instead of reporting the past.
2. Anomaly detection. "Today's spend is 45% above your 7-day average." This catches problems on day one, not day 25. It doesn't need a budget — it just needs a baseline.
3. Push delivery. The signal has to arrive in Slack or email without anyone logging into anything. If prevention requires a login, it's not prevention. It's hoping someone remembers to check.
Dashboards Still Matter
This isn't an argument against dashboards. Cost Explorer is invaluable for answering "why did this happen?" after a signal tells you something is wrong.
The workflow should be:
- Signal arrives: "Amber — AWS spend 30% above baseline today."
- You investigate: Open Cost Explorer, filter by service, find the spike.
- You act: Scale down the service, fix the config, adjust the pipeline.
Signals discover the problem. Dashboards diagnose it. You need both — but in that order.
The Real Question
If you missed your cloud budget last month, ask yourself: when did you find out? If the answer is "when the invoice arrived" or "when I checked the dashboard," the problem isn't your budget. It's your feedback loop.
Dashboards make you aware of problems you already know to look for. Signals make you aware of problems you didn't know existed. Budget prevention requires the second kind.
Get started: Connect AWS to StackSpend for daily cost visibility and anomaly alerts. Learn more about AWS cost monitoring.