CLF-C02 Billing, Pricing, and Support Practice Question
A company's finance team needs the most granular AWS billing data available, including cost and usage data at the hourly level, broken down by resource ID and cost allocation tags, delivered to Amazon S3 for analysis with their BI tools. Which AWS service provides this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse AWS Cost Explorer's export feature with the granularity of CUR, but Cost Explorer exports are limited to monthly or daily granularity and lack the full resource-level and tag breakdowns that CUR provides.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS Cost and Usage Report
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the correct choice because it provides the most granular billing data available, including hourly-level cost and usage, broken down by resource ID and cost allocation tags, and can be delivered to Amazon S3 for analysis with BI tools. This service is designed for detailed, customizable reports that meet the finance team's requirements for granularity and integration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
AWS Cost Explorer offers interactive charts and dashboards with up to 13 months of historical data, plus filtering by service, linked account, or tag. However, it only surfaces pre-aggregated views at daily/monthly granularity and cannot provide raw, per-resource hourly usage records. It also has no native mechanism to export the underlying line-item data to Amazon S3 for external analytics, which is a core requirement that the Cost and Usage Report fulfills.
- ✗
AWS Budgets
Why it's wrong here
AWS Budgets is an alerting and monitoring service that lets you set custom cost or usage thresholds and receive notifications via Amazon SNS or email when you approach or exceed them. While Budgets can track actual and forecasted spend, it only stores summarized budget status and alarm history, not detailed billing line items. It cannot produce an S3-delivered dataset with resource-level, hourly granularity, so it is unsuitable for deep cost and usage analysis.
- ✓
AWS Cost and Usage Report
Why this is correct
The CUR is the most comprehensive billing data product AWS offers. It delivers hourly or daily cost and usage data with resource-level detail and cost allocation tags to an S3 bucket, enabling analysis with tools like Athena or QuickSight.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Billing Metrics
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudWatch Billing Metrics are published as AWS/Namespace metrics (e.g., EstimatedCharges) at the account level, typically at a 5-minute or hourly resolution. These metrics are useful for triggering CloudWatch alarms on overall estimated charges, but they aggregate spend across all services and resources. They do not include per-resource identifiers, usage quantities, or cost allocation tags, and they are not exported to S3 as a comprehensive data set, so they cannot replace the Cost and Usage Report for granular billing analysis.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every CLF-C02 question from scratch — 988 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on CLF-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. Which AWS service provides detailed billing reports that can be delivered hourly to Amazon S3 for custom analysis with tools like Amazon Athena or Redshift?
easy- A.AWS Cost Explorer
- B.AWS Budgets
- ✓ C.AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
- D.Amazon CloudWatch Billing Metrics
Why C: AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the correct service because it provides the most granular billing data, including hourly usage and cost details, which can be delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. This allows you to use analytics tools like Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift to run custom queries and perform in-depth analysis on the raw billing data.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.