AWS / Billing and Cost Management / Cost Allocation Tags

This documentation provides an overview of the AWS Billing and Cost Management / Cost Allocation Tags.

• Introduction
• Services with Tags
• Activating Cost Allocation Tags
• Tag Editor
  • Listing Services that Support Tags

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Introduction

AWS service costs are tracked using properties for each service, including service name, region, availability zone, etc. These properties allow for a course understanding of costs.

However, more granular detail is often needed, for example to understand the costs for a specific EC2 instance. This can be accomplished using "cost allocation tags".

Services with Tags

Some AWS services provide a Tag feature, which allows defining Key=Value pairs. The following table lists common services that can have tags defined. Once a tag is defined, it may take a day or more for the tag to be shown in other tools and the tag will not be added to historical cost data.

AWS Services with Tags

Type	Service	Comments
Compute	EC2	Instances, volumes, snapshots, AMIs. The tag with key of Name is typically set to the instance name.
	ECS	Clusters, tasks, services.
	Lambda
	Elastic Beanstock	Environments.
Storage	S3	Buckets, objects, but not folders.
	EBS	EC2 volumes, snapshots.
	Glacier	Vaults.
Database	RDS	Instances, snapshots, read replicas.
	DynamoDB	Tables.
Networking	VPC	VPCs, subnets, route tables.
	Route53	Hosted Zones, Records.
Application Integration	SNS	Topics.
	SQS	Queues.
Management and Governance	CloudFormation	Stacks.
	CloudTrail	Trails, insights.
	Config	Rules, aggregations.
	Organizations	Accounts, organization units.
Monitoring and Analytics	CloudWatch	Alarms, dashboards, log groups.

Activating Cost Allocation Tags

Once a tag is defined, use the Billing and Cost Managerment / Cost Allocation Tags link to manage tags for billing. It may take a while (day or more) to see the tag listed. Not all tags need to be activated for cost tracking. For example, in the following, Name is the name of EC2 instances and SystemId indicates a client to be invoiced.

Cost Allocation Tags (see full-size image)

Tag Editor

The Resource Groups and Tag Editor tool can be used to search and edit tags. See the Resource Groups and Tag Editor link, which may be shown as a tool at the top of the AWS console, as shown below.

Resource Groups & Tag Editor Link on the AWS Console (see full-size image)

Listing Services that Support Tags

It is useful to understand which resources in an account can be tagged (and which have no tags) so that costs can be understood and properly handled.

1. Use the Tagging / Tag Editor to link to display the tag editor.
2. Select Regions:
   • For example select All regions to review all resources.
3. Select Resource types:
   • For example select All supported resource types to review all resources.
4. Select Tags:
   • Leave blank to list all resources that could be tagged.
5. Select Search resources to list matching data:
   • The results will show (not tagged) if no tags have been defined.

Note that the tag key Name is used by default in the second column to help understand the resource. Therefore, every resource should either have a default Name (assigned by AWS when the resource is created) or Name should be defined after the resource is created. The name should be unique within the type of service, for example the EC2 instance name, S3 bucket name, etc.

Tag Editor Search Results (see full-size image)