AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct approach is to use AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. This combination provides the most detailed and comprehensive solution for long-term cost analysis in a multi-account environment. CUR provides granular line-item data that can be stored indefinitely in Amazon S3. By integrating CUR with AWS Glue and Amazon Athena, the finance team can perform complex SQL queries directly on the data stored in S3. Amazon QuickSight can then connect to Athena to build interactive dashboards for visualization and reporting, fulfilling all the specified requirements with a serverless, managed architecture.

Using AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer is an incorrect choice because while these tools are useful for high-level monitoring and alerting, they lack the granularity and long-term, ad-hoc query capabilities required. Cost Explorer is limited in its historical data retention and is not designed for the deep, SQL-based analysis that CUR and Athena provide.

Creating a custom solution with AWS Lambda and Amazon RDS is not optimal. This approach represents undifferentiated heavy lifting, requiring significant development and maintenance effort. The serverless pattern of CUR, Athena, and QuickSight is the recommended AWS best practice that directly replaces such custom solutions. Additionally, Detailed Billing Reports are a legacy feature that AWS has replaced with the more comprehensive Cost and Usage Reports.

Using AWS Config is incorrect because it is a service for assessing and auditing resource configurations and compliance, not for analyzing detailed billing and usage data. While it can be used for cost-related governance (e.g., enforcing tags), it is not the primary tool for the type of deep cost analysis required by the finance department.