For what purpose is AWS Cost Explorer primarily used?

AWS Cost Explorer is primarily used to visualize and analyze spending over time. This tool provides users with the ability to create detailed reports that showcase their spending patterns across various AWS services. By examining historical expenditure, users can identify trends, detect anomalies, and understand where their costs are coming from, which is essential for effective budgeting and financial management in the cloud.

While predicting future cloud spending based on historical data is a useful feature of Cost Explorer, the primary purpose is centered around visualizing and analyzing past spending. Cost Explorer enables users to drill down into costs, filter by services, tags, and usage types, thus giving them a clear understanding of their cost structure over a designated period.

The other options relate to different functionalities not provided by Cost Explorer. For example, managing user access permissions pertains to Identity and Access Management (IAM) within AWS, while automating billing processes is not a feature of Cost Explorer itself. Therefore, the focus of Cost Explorer is accurately captured by its main function of visualizing and analyzing spending over time.