cur-data

Knowledge about AWS Cost and Usage Report data structure, column formats, and analysis patterns

SKILL.md

GitHub

AWS CUR Data Skill

CUR File Formats

The project supports three CUR file formats:

  • CSV: Plain text, largest file size
  • CSV.GZ: Gzip compressed CSV, smaller
  • Parquet: Columnar format, fastest and smallest (recommended)

Column Name Variants

AWS CUR has two naming conventions. The data processor handles both:

Canonical Name Old Format New Format
cost lineItem/UnblendedCost line_item_unblended_cost
account_id lineItem/UsageAccountId line_item_usage_account_id
service product/ProductName product_product_name
date lineItem/UsageStartDate line_item_usage_start_date
region product/Region product_region
line_item_type lineItem/LineItemType line_item_line_item_type

Key Cost Columns

# Unblended cost - actual cost before discounts
line_item_unblended_cost

# Blended cost - averaged across organization
line_item_blended_cost

# Net cost - after discounts applied
line_item_net_unblended_cost

# Usage amount
line_item_usage_amount

Line Item Types

LINE_ITEM_TYPES = {
    'Usage': 'Normal usage charges',
    'Tax': 'Tax charges',
    'Fee': 'AWS fees',
    'Refund': 'Refunds/credits',
    'Credit': 'Applied credits',
    'RIFee': 'Reserved Instance fees',
    'DiscountedUsage': 'RI/SP discounted usage',
    'SavingsPlanCoveredUsage': 'Savings Plan usage',
    'SavingsPlanNegation': 'SP cost adjustment',
    'SavingsPlanUpfrontFee': 'SP upfront payment',
    'SavingsPlanRecurringFee': 'SP monthly fee',
    'BundledDiscount': 'Free tier/bundled',
    'EdpDiscount': 'Enterprise discount',
}

Discount Analysis

To identify discounts and credits:

discount_types = ['Credit', 'Refund', 'EdpDiscount', 'BundledDiscount']
discounts = df[df['line_item_type'].isin(discount_types)]

Savings Plan Analysis

Key columns for savings plans:

savings_plan_columns = [
    'savings_plan_savings_plan_arn',
    'savings_plan_savings_plan_rate',
    'savings_plan_used_commitment',
    'savings_plan_total_commitment_to_date',
]

Common Aggregations

# Cost by service
df.groupby('service').agg({'cost': 'sum'}).sort_values('cost', ascending=False)

# Cost by account and service
df.groupby(['account_id', 'service']).agg({'cost': 'sum'})

# Daily trends
df.groupby(df['date'].dt.date).agg({'cost': 'sum'})

# Monthly summary
df.groupby(df['date'].dt.to_period('M')).agg({'cost': 'sum'})

Anomaly Detection

The project uses z-score based detection:

mean = daily_costs.mean()
std = daily_costs.std()
z_scores = (daily_costs - mean) / std
anomalies = daily_costs[abs(z_scores) > 2]  # 2 std deviations

Mock Data Reference

Test fixtures provide 6 months of data:

  • Production (111111111111): 87% of costs, steady growth
  • Development (210987654321): 13% of costs, spiky (load testing)
  • Services: EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Lambda
  • Regions: us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, ap-northeast-1, etc.
  • Total: ~$6.2M over 182 days