Exercise 3: Finding Which Service Drove a 20% Bill Increase — Possible Solution ==================================================================== The real, correct tool here is Cost Explorer. It's specifically designed to analyze real spend over time, broken down by dimensions like service, account, or tag -- exactly the "where did this increase actually come from" question being asked. CloudWatch wouldn't answer this question because it isn't a cost analysis tool at all -- it's built to answer "is this resource healthy and performing correctly right now" (CPU, network, alarms, logs), not "how much did we spend, and on what." CloudWatch has no real concept of billing or cost breakdown by service built into its own metrics and alarms. ANSWER: Cost Explorer is the right tool, since it's purpose-built to break down real spend by service (and other dimensions) over time, directly answering which specific service drove the increase. CloudWatch alone wouldn't help here because it monitors resource health and performance, not cost -- the two tools answer genuinely different real questions, as the chapter's own comparison table lays out directly. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This correctly picks the tool matched to the specific real question being asked (a cost-attribution question, not a health/performance question), and explains WHY the other tool doesn't apply rather than just naming the right one -- reinforcing the chapter's own point that CloudWatch, Cost Explorer, and Budgets are three genuinely different tools, not interchangeable ways to "monitor AWS."