A company wants to implement detailed tracking of its cloud costs by department and project. Which AWS feature or service should the company use?

Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs that you can apply to AWS resources. When activated in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console, these tags are used to organize and track costs on a detailed level. By assigning tags such as department:finance or project:alpha to resources, a company can categorize its spending and generate cost allocation reports that break down AWS costs by these specific business dimensions, directly fulfilling the requirement.

A. Consolidated billing: This feature of AWS Organizations aggregates costs from multiple accounts into a single bill but does not, by itself, provide granular cost tracking by project or department.

C. AWS Marketplace: This is a digital catalog for finding, buying, and deploying third-party software and services. It is not a tool for tracking internal AWS resource costs.

D. AWS Budgets: This service is used to set spending limits and receive alerts when costs exceed a threshold. While budgets can be filtered by tags, the tags themselves are the feature used to implement the tracking.

1. AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide: "You can use tags to organize your resources

and cost allocation tags to track your AWS costs on a detailed level. After you activate cost allocation tags

AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report. This makes it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs."

Source: AWS Documentation

Billing and Cost Management User Guide

"Using cost allocation tags".

2. AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide: "You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts... Consolidated billing doesn't change anything about the services that are offered to each account."

Source: AWS Documentation

Billing and Cost Management User Guide

"Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations".

3. AWS Budgets User Guide: "AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage... You can create budgets at the monthly

quarterly

or yearly level

and customize the start and end dates. Budget alerts can be sent through Amazon SNS

email

or both."

Source: AWS Documentation

AWS Budgets User Guide

"Managing your costs with AWS Budgets".