Proactive AWS Cost Management: Visualizing Extended Support Charges
Author: Adam Altschuler - CloudHealth Sr. Technical Account Manager Lead
Deploying workloads on the public cloud can become surprisingly expensive. How do the costs get so high? Often, overlooked expenses add up fast, and AWS Extended Support is a prime example. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen AWS roll out these Extended Support charges:
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In October 2023, Amazon EKS announced a $0.60 per cluster, per hour charge for Amazon EKS extended support for Kubernetes versions 1.23 and higher. This applied to all commercial regions, effective in the April 2024 billing cycle.
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In March 2024, Amazon RDS extended support charges applied to MySQL version 5.7 and Postgres version 11.
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In November 2025, Amazon OpenSearch extended support started for 19 versions of Elasticsearch opensource, and 11 versions of OpenSearch
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Looking forward, Amazon ElastiCache extended support will start in February 2026 for version 4 and version 5 for Redis OSS
So, what exactly are Extended Support charges?
AWS applies these fees to resources running on versions no longer covered by standard support. This means you will incur additional costs to continue using those resources. These charges can span services and easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for large enterprises. AWS provides a 1 to 3 year grace period for users to migrate to a newer version with standard support, avoiding these extra charges. However, after extended support ends, AWS will automatically migrate/upgrade your resources to a supported version.
If you are feeling anxious about keeping track of these changes, we get it. They’re complicated.
CloudHealth has your back! We can help you navigate these complexities by providing you the tools to view your cost and usage data at a granular level, including your extended support charges and impacted resources.
FlexReports to the Rescue!
CloudHealth's FlexReports are a powerful way to create custom reports on top of the many datasets available in CloudHealth. Using FlexReports, customers can easily build reports across various dimensions to perform more granular analysis on cost, usage, and asset data. These reports will help you answer questions relevant to your business needs, such as viewing costs for a specific month organized by AWS Account, Service Item, and Charge Type. In the case of AWS Extended Support charges, FlexReports can provide a detailed understanding of the charges you have incurred that otherwise may have slipped under the radar.
To find out how much you have been charged for Extended Support for the current and previous month, grouped by the Product code, follow these simple steps:
- Navigate to the FlexReports, and click on New Report
- In the Classic CloudHealth experience, FlexReports are located under Reports.
Once in the FlexReports screen, click on the “New Report” Button on the top right corner.
- In the New CloudHealth Experience, FlexReports is located under Reporting, and then Reports.
Once in the FlexReports screen, click “Create using UI or SQL”.
- Ensure that the Datasource is set to “AWS Cost & Usage Report” In classic, add a descriptive name.
- Now, using the Report Query Editor:
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In the Classic experience, first remove all existing text (including brackets), copy the query below, then hit Apply
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In the New Experience, switch from UI to SQL Query, then remove existing text (including brackets), copy the query below, then hit Next. You will then need to add a Report Name, Description, as well as adding labels and other settings.
Query:
SELECT
timeInterval_Month AS Month,
lineItem_ProductCode AS LineItem_ProductCode,
lineItem_LineItemDescription AS LineItem_LineItemDescription,
SUM(lineItem_UnblendedCost) AS Extended_Support_Cost
FROM
AWS_CUR
WHERE
LOWER(lineItem_UsageType) LIKE LOWER('%extendedsupport%')
GROUP BY
timeInterval_Month,
lineItem_ProductCode,
lineItem_LineItemDescription
Another option is to use the NetUnblendedCost. That query is listed below:
SELECT
timeInterval_Month AS Month,
lineItem_ProductCode AS LineItem_ProductCode,
lineItem_LineItemDescription AS LineItem_LineItemDescription,
SUM(lineItem_NetUnblendedCost) AS Extended_Support_Cost
FROM
AWS_CUR
WHERE
LOWER(lineItem_UsageType) LIKE LOWER('%extendedsupport%')
GROUP BY
timeInterval_Month,
lineItem_ProductCode,
lineItem_LineItemDescription
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While the above queries are generic, they serve as a good starting point to make the report your own.
If you have perspectives configured, choosing perspectives that will help make engineering conversations easier is critical.
Loading the query will load report configurations automatically - you can add perspectives like Account Owner ID, Resource tags, Team identifiers, depending on what you have configured. You can also add filters for Business Units, Teams or Accounts, to make the scope of this data smaller:
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The above steps will load line items that are associated with AWS Extended Support relevant to your use case.
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In the Classic Experience, use the “Chart preview” feature to visualize your data.
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In the New Experience, click “Preview Report” to visualize your data
Creating Awareness at Your Company
Once you have identified the financial impact and understand which resources are impacted, you’ll need to reach out to the application owners. The query above includes steps that will help you find the owners using perspectives that you have configured for your tenant.
Although cost can be the starting point of the conversation, it is important to call out the impact if this is not managed by the end of Extended Support. As mentioned earlier, AWS will automatically migrate the version, which could break applications.
The goal of these conversations should be to ensure the application teams have the appropriate awareness and can plan for migrating, and not that they immediately need drop everything to make this change.
In addition to working with impacted application owners, it’s important to create awareness within all of engineering and architecture. Not only so that new applications are not launched using Extended Support versions, but also to make teams aware that this could happen in the future. These conversations will be much easier when engineering is already aware of the Extended Support model.
Another good way to create awareness is the creation of a Dashboard. In the New CloudHealth Experience, FlexReports can be embedded into a custom Dashboard and shared with users across the organization. In the example below, we have a custom AWS Dashboard showing 2 widgets displaying Extended Support charges. Being able to embed these reports into a dashboard empowers and educates teams on the impact of Extended Support charges and encourages them to take action.
Take Action!
If you’re a current CloudHealth customer, tracking these changes in support charges is as easy as creating a Report.
If you’re not a CloudHealth customer, get started with a free trial today, and start taking action on Extended Support charges!