Costs appears to be excluding of Publisher account costs

[thetombombadil]

Hi again!

From my experimentation it appears that when using a centralised account (as the publisher) with linked accounts, the central account(publisher) costs aren't included by aws-cost-explorer. This is desirable for us as we have a single billing account which has linked costs from all our child accounts, so we can access our aws costs for all accounts in one place.

Tested using Unblendedcost& opensourceelectrolux/aws-cost-exporter:v1.0.10.

From /metrics:

# HELP aws_daily_cost_usd Daily cost of an AWS account in USD
# TYPE aws_daily_cost_usd gauge
aws_daily_cost_usd{ChargeType="Usage",Publisher=<root-account-id-goes-here>} 1958.44886696

Metrics portion of config:

metrics:
  - metric_name: aws_daily_cost_usd
    group_by:
      enabled: false
    metric_type: UnblendedCost

Roughly equivalent aws-cli command from what I can gather, with root profile being the publisher account:

aws ce get-cost-and-usage --time-period '{"Start": "2025-03-13", "End": "2025-03-14"}' --granularity DAILY --metrics UnblendedCost --profile root --output text

RESULTSBYTIME   True
TIMEPERIOD      2025-03-14      2025-03-13
UNBLENDEDCOST   2864.44886696   USD

As you can see, 1958.44886696 != 2864.44886696.

So I experimented with filtering out the root account (which is the publisher), which brings the awscli result within $1 of the metric reported by cost explorer. It's not quite lined up, but it's much closer.

aws ce get-cost-and-usage --time-period '{"Start": "2025-03-13", "End": "2025-03-14"}' --granularity DAILY --metrics UnblendedCost --profile root --output text --filter '{"Not": {"Dimensions": {"Key": "LINKED_ACCOUNT", "Values": ["root-account-id-goes-here"]}}}'

RESULTSBYTIME   True
TIMEPERIOD      2025-03-14      2025-03-13
UNBLENDEDCOST   1957.7170637458 USD

I can also confirm I can't see the AccountName="<root-account-id-goes-here>" label for any of the aws_daily_cost_by_region_by_account metrics under /metrics, which adds weight that the publisher account metrics aren't being included. Using the following config:

  - metric_name: aws_daily_cost_by_region_by_account
    group_by:
      enabled: true
      groups:
        - type: DIMENSION
          key: REGION
          label_name: Region
        - type: DIMENSION
          key: LINKED_ACCOUNT
          label_name: AccountName
      merge_minor_cost:
        enabled: true
        threshold: 10
        tag_value: Other
    metric_type: UnblendedCost

Strangely I could see the AccountName="<root-account-id-goes-here>" label for the aws_daily_cost_by_service_by_account metric however, using this config:

  - metric_name: aws_daily_cost_by_service_by_account
    group_by:
      enabled: true
      groups:
        - type: DIMENSION
          key: SERVICE
          label_name: ServiceName
        - type: DIMENSION
          key: LINKED_ACCOUNT
          label_name: AccountName
      merge_minor_cost:
        enabled: false
        threshold: 10
        tag_value: Other
    metric_type: UnblendedCost

Appreciate your time, thanks again!

[gluckzhang]

Update: finally have some time to check this and I think I have found something related. In a response from AWS API, we missed checking the existence of NextPageToken. This could cause buggy behavior if there is lots of cost data and paginated by the API. I am working on a fix now :)

[gluckzhang]

Here is the fix: #32 Please feel free to give it a try if can run the exporter from the source code. I am not sure if missing NextPageToken is the root cause of the buggy behavior you reported but it can be most likely related.