Overview
CUR 2.0 (Cost and Usage Report) is AWS's detailed billing dataset. Once a CUR 2.0 export is created, AWS delivers detailed cost and usage data to an S3 bucket on a daily basis. Uniskai uses this data as the source for building detailed cost charts and reports.
This article covers the first part of the flow — creating the CUR 2.0 export in the AWS Console.
Prerequisites
Access to the AWS account with permissions to manage Billing and Cost Management and S3.
An S3 bucket for the export — you can create a new one directly during setup.
Setting up the export in AWS Console
Step 1 — Open Data Exports
1.1 Sign in to the AWS Console and open Billing and Cost Management.
1.2 In the left navigation menu, under Cost and Usage Analysis, click Data Exports.
1.3 On the Data Exports page, in the Exports and dashboards section, click Create.
Step 2 — Configure export details
2.1 In the Export details section, select Standard data export.
2.2 Enter an Export name, e.g. uniskai-cur2-export.
Export names can have up to 128 characters and must be unique. Valid characters are a–z, A–Z, 0–9, - (hyphen), and _ (underscore).
2.3 In the Data table content settings section, select CUR 2.0.
2.4 Under Time granularity, select Hourly.
Step 3 — Configure delivery options
3.1 Data export refresh cadence is set to Daily — the export is refreshed up to one time per day. This cannot be changed.
3.2 Under File versioning, select Overwrite existing data export file. Overwriting exports saves on Amazon S3 storage costs.
3.3 Under Report data integration, leave both checkboxes unselected — do not select Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift.
3.4 Under Compression type and file format, select Parquet from the dropdown.
Do not enable the Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift integration — Uniskai requires a plain export with the Parquet format.
Step 4 — Configure the S3 bucket
4.1 In the Data export storage settings section, under Storage account, keep This account selected.
4.2 Next to the S3 bucket field, click Configure.
4.3 In the Configure S3 bucket dialog, choose one of the options:
Create a bucket — enter an S3 bucket name and select a Region.
Select existing bucket — pick a bucket you already have.
Bucket names must be globally unique and must not contain spaces or uppercase letters.
4.4 Review the Bucket policy shown in the dialog — it is applied to the bucket automatically so AWS billing services can deliver the export files.
4.5 Confirm the dialog.
Step 5 — Set the path prefix and create the export
5.1 Enter an S3 path prefix — it will be prepended to the name of your data export.
Note: Valid prefix names must not include a trailing / or ..
5.2 Optionally, add Tags.
5.3 Click Create.
Verifying it worked
After clicking Create, a green confirmation banner appears: "Export request … has been successfully submitted." (
The first export delivery to Amazon S3 completes within 24 hours, and then recurs daily according to the refresh cadence. You can leave the page and check back later.
The new export appears in the Exports and dashboards list with the Healthy status, export type Standard data export, and data table CUR 2.0.
Step 6 — Refresh the account data
6.1 Open the Uniskai platform and select your connected AWS account in the account selector at the top of the page.
6.2 Click Refresh now in the top bar to pull the latest data. The label next to the button shows when the data was last updated (e.g. "Updated yesterday").
The first CUR 2.0 export is delivered by AWS within 24 hours of creation, so the data may not be available in Uniskai immediately after setup.