Centralize cost allocation and CUR analysis in the management account with Athena and QuickSight
A company is running several applications in the AWS Cloud. The applications are specific to separate business units in the company. The company is running the components of the applications in several AWS accounts that are in an organization in AWS Organizations. Every cloud resource in the company’s organization has a tag that is named BusinessUnit. Every tag already has the appropriate value of the business unit name. The company needs to allocate its cloud costs to different business units. The company also needs to visualize the cloud costs for each business unit. Which solution will meet these requirements?
Community Votes
100% of anonymous learners picked answer A. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.
Community Insight
Cost allocation tags must be activated in the management account for the organization to include them in consolidated billing, and a single Cost and Usage Report there captures every member account's rows so one Athena query and one QuickSight dashboard serve the whole company.
A company runs applications for separate business units across multiple accounts in an organization, and every cloud resource already carries a BusinessUnit tag with the correct business unit name. The company must allocate cloud costs to business units and visualize the cost for each.
Creating a Cost and Usage Report in every member account. That multiplies the number of report pipelines to manage and then still requires a cross-account aggregation step before anything can be visualised, whereas the management account already receives consolidated organization billing data in one place.
Community Discussion (9 comments)
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Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
Because every resource already carries the BusinessUnit tag, the remaining work is to make sure the tag participates in cost allocation and that the resulting data is queryable. Activating the BusinessUnit cost allocation tag in the management account applies it across the organization, so the consolidated billing data is broken down by business unit. A single Cost and Usage Report delivered to one S3 bucket in the management account contains every member account's line items, Amazon Athena queries that data in place with standard SQL, and Amazon QuickSight provides the visualization. One report, one query layer, and one dashboard is the least data infrastructure to build and maintain for the requirement.Why the Other Options Are Wrong
B: Activating the cost allocation tag per member account and using a CloudWatch dashboard does not work for cost analysis, because CloudWatch dashboards visualise operational metrics rather than the line-item cost data in a Cost and Usage Report, and a saved report in one account cannot be queried from another. C: Creating a Cost and Usage Report and a bucket in every member account multiplies the pipelines to maintain and still leaves the data fragmented across accounts, so the management account has no consolidated dataset to visualise. D: It has the same per-account fragmentation problem as C, and a CloudWatch dashboard is not a cost reporting tool, so the visualization requirement is not met even though Athena and QuickSight are the right query tools.Community Comment Notes
The community voted 100 to 0 for A, and the top-voted comment identified the two required components, Athena and QuickSight, with another confirming the cost allocation tag must be set in the management account. A dissenting note pointed out a wording nuance, that the tag is activated rather than created, which is a terminology observation that does not change which option satisfies the requirement.Official Reference
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