Cost and Usage Report Requirements

Your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the source of billing data that CloudZero uses to show your AWS costs. If your account already has a CUR, verify it matches the settings below. An existing report is preferred because CloudZero can access your historical cost data. If you have an existing report with historical data in a different format, reach out to your account manager to bring that data into CloudZero.

The automated setup detects a compatible Cost and Usage Report and connects to it. If it can't find one, it creates a new report for you.

Required settings

CloudZero supports both CUR 2.0 (Data Exports) and CUR 1.0 (Legacy CUR export). For new connections, AWS and CloudZero both recommend CUR 2.0, which provides a more consistent schema and more detailed cost and usage data.

CUR 2.0 (Data Exports)

To create a CUR 2.0 export, configure it in AWS Billing and Cost Management > Data Exports with these settings. For a walkthrough, see Creating a standard data export in the AWS documentation.

CUR 1.0 (Legacy CUR export)

If you have an existing CUR 1.0 report, verify it uses these settings. For details on creating or modifying a Legacy CUR, see Creating reports in the AWS documentation.

Recommended S3 settings

These settings are not required but help keep your S3 bucket organized:

Tag normalization in Parquet

Parquet CUR files (required for CUR 2.0, optional for CUR 1.0) normalize tag column names by converting them to lowercase and replacing non-alphanumeric characters with underscores. If you have multiple active cost allocation tags that differ only by capitalization or punctuation (for example, Environment and environment), they collapse into a single column in the Parquet file. CloudZero ingests the file as-is, and you can use Dimensions to normalize inconsistent tag variations into a single business category.

To avoid tag collisions, standardize your tag keys in AWS so each concept uses one consistent form. For details on how Parquet normalization works, see Cost allocation tags in the AWS documentation.