monitoring

Surprise AWS bills usually come from one of a handful of sources. Cost Explorer patterns, budget alerts, anomaly detection, and the tagging discipline that turns "who owns this $4,000 spike" into a 30-second answer instead of a week-long Slack thread.

CloudWatch is the most underused service on every AWS bill — and the most overspent on the ones that take it seriously. Logs, metrics, and alarm patterns that catch real outages without burying you in noise (or in the bill).