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In addition to Leo's comments you may want to check: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/ and see if anything applies.
It could be the second option. Do you have the EC2 instances running in one region and then uploading/downloading data from an S3 bucket in a different region?
If you uploaded data from External to the EC2 instances using SCP then it will not count towards any costs. This would be data transfer FROM the internet to AWS and there the charge is 0 USD/GB (data transfer in per month).
Those lines don't contain enough detail to determine what the charge relates to. In general, if you have nothing except an EC2 instance with a public IP, the "regional traffic" you'd get charged for would be all traffic that you send to the internet or outside your local AWS region.
You can find more details in Cost Explorer in the AWS console. In the "usage type group" filter on the right, search for "data transfer" and select all the matching items. Finally, at the top right, set "group by" to "API operation" for a detailed breakdown of the costs.
The graph and the table below should now show only data transfer usage and costs. Do you see some one or two items making up your ~1 GB of "usage"?
You can also try setting the "granularity" option to "daily" and adjust the date range to include days up to two days ago (more recent data isn't complete yet). This would reveal if the unexpected traffic volume was incurred on a single day, for example. It also allows you to see the costs as they are progressing during the current month, without waiting for a full monthly bill to be ready.
Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately that didn't work since there is no actual cost as it never exceeded the free tier transfer rates.
If you set the "granularity" to "daily", I think you might still see at least the data volumes in gigabytes. I'm not sure how Free Tier use is accounted for exactly, but it might work via a crediting mechanism. On a monthly level, it would have a total of zero, but on a daily level, it might still be visible,
Tried that. Graph is completely empty with or without filters. Guess there needs to be an actual cost when it comes to free tier.
Your instance may contact other AWS ELBs or IPs to pull packages/patches from OS repos. Amazon Linux/RHEL/Ubuntu all have repos hosted in AWS regions. I would imagine many other distributions do as well.
In your case, you are not being charged -- all are below the free tier -- but cost for data transfer between AZ's and regions is cheaper (and faster) than going to Internet destinations, so having OS repos hosted in AWS is value-add for you.
Again, not saying 100% this is what your traffic is, but it is possible explanation and something you may not realized.
Hope this helps.
This was very helpful, thank you. Not something I had considered. A follow up question to your answer, how is it cheaper than going to an internet destination? I can see how it's faster but wouldn't getting packages from the internet be free since it's an inbound transfer from the internet?
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For the sake of completeness, copying data over the internet to the EC2 instance with SCP will incur some cost. While the traffic flow towards the cloud is free of charge, there will be TCP return traffic and SSH/SCP control traffic also in the reverse direction, counting as outbound traffic from EC2 to the internet. However, I would guess the amount would typically be somewhere between 5% and 15% of the (free) ingress traffic.
I did have a read through it and thank you for replying. I'm not using any other services, just that one EC2 instance. No S3 buckets being used.