Cost Intelligence Overview

Guardian Pro's Cost Intelligence module gives you full visibility into your AWS spending, surfaces optimization opportunities, and helps you maintain financial governance across your entire cloud environment.

Rather than simply reporting what you spent, Cost Intelligence analyses your usage patterns, detects anomalies, identifies waste, and recommends concrete actions to reduce your cloud bill -- with projected savings for every recommendation.

What Cost Intelligence Delivers

Capability	Description
Cost Dashboard	Unified view of total spend, trends, and forecasts across all connected accounts
Service Breakdown	Detailed spend analysis per AWS service with trend indicators
Region Analysis	Geographic distribution of costs to identify region-level optimization opportunities
Anomaly Detection	Automated detection of unexpected spending spikes and new services
Budget Management	Configurable budgets with warning and critical threshold alerts
Rightsizing	AI-powered recommendations to resize or terminate underutilised compute and storage
Waste Detection	Identification of idle resources, unattached volumes, and unused infrastructure
Savings Plans	Recommendations for AWS Savings Plans based on your usage patterns
Reserved Instances	RI portfolio management, utilisation tracking, and expiry alerts
Savings Tracker	Track realised savings from implemented recommendations over time

How It Works

Cost Intelligence operates on data from your AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). Once you configure CUR in your AWS account, Guardian Pro automatically ingests and analyses your billing data through an automated pipeline.

CUR Data Ingested --> Cost Analysis Pipeline --> Dashboard & Recommendations
                                              --> Anomaly Detection
                                              --> Budget Monitoring
                                              --> Optimisation Engine

Prerequisites

Cost Intelligence requires AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to be configured in your AWS account. See CUR Setup for step-by-step instructions.

Getting Started

1. Configure CUR

Before Cost Intelligence can analyse your spending, you need to enable AWS Cost and Usage Reports. This is a one-time setup in the AWS Console that typically takes 5 minutes, with data becoming available within 24 hours.

See the CUR Setup Guide for detailed instructions.

2. Verify Data Ingestion

Once CUR is configured, Guardian Pro displays the data sync status on the Cost Dashboard. You will see a status indicator showing whether data has been successfully ingested.

3. Run Your First Analysis

With data available, navigate to the Cost Dashboard and click Run Analysis. Guardian Pro processes your cost data, generates breakdowns, detects anomalies, and produces optimisation recommendations.

4. Review and Act

Explore the dashboard to understand your spending patterns, then move to specific areas:

• Review Service Breakdown to see which services drive the most cost.
• Check Anomaly Detection for any unexpected spending patterns.
• Browse Rightsizing and Waste Detection for immediate savings opportunities.
• Set up Budgets to stay within spending limits going forward.

Cost Analysis vs. Financial Advisory

Guardian Pro separates cost capabilities into two complementary areas:

Cost Intelligence (this section) focuses on understanding and analysing your current spending:

• Where is the money going?
• What changed compared to last month?
• Are there anomalies or unexpected charges?

Financial Advisory focuses on forward-looking optimisation:

• Rightsizing -- resize or terminate underutilised resources
• Savings Plans -- commit to usage for discounted rates
• Reserved Instances -- manage your RI portfolio
• Savings Tracker -- measure the impact of your optimisation efforts

Both work together to give you a complete picture: understand what you are spending today, and take action to spend less tomorrow.

Multi-Account Support

Cost Intelligence works across all accounts connected to Guardian Pro. You can:

• View aggregate spending across your entire AWS Organization
• Drill down into individual account costs
• Compare spending patterns between accounts
• Set budgets at the account or organization level

tip

Use the account selector in the top navigation to switch between individual account views and the aggregate organization view.

Time Periods

Cost Intelligence supports flexible time ranges for analysis:

Period	Use Case
Last 7 Days	Spot recent anomalies and short-term trends
Last 30 Days	Monthly spending review and budget tracking
Last 3 Months	Quarterly trend analysis
Last 6 Months	Medium-term pattern identification
Last 12 Months	Year-over-year comparison and seasonal patterns
Custom Range	Ad-hoc analysis for specific date ranges

Integration with Other Modules

Cost Intelligence data enriches other Guardian Pro modules:

• Action Centre -- Cost-related findings appear alongside security findings, prioritised by potential savings.
• AI Assistant -- Ask natural language questions about your spending, such as "What is driving my EC2 costs?" or "How much could I save with Reserved Instances?"
• Architecture Advisor -- Cost data is correlated with architecture risks to identify underutilised resources in your dependency graph.
• Compliance -- Cost governance controls are mapped to compliance framework requirements.

Next Steps

• Configure CUR -- Required first step to enable Cost Intelligence
• Cost Dashboard -- Your central hub for spending visibility
• Anomaly Detection -- Catch unexpected spending before it becomes a problem