Question

A data engineering team runs ad-hoc analytics on a data lake using Amazon Athena. Analysts have complained about unexpectedly high monthly Athena costs. The team needs to identify which specific queries and users are scanning the most data so they can take corrective action, without deploying additional infrastructure. What is the MOST operationally efficient way to gain this visibility?

Accepted Answer

Query the Athena query history metadata (e.g., via CloudWatch metrics and the Athena DataScannedInBytes metric grouped by workgroup) and enforce per-query data scan limits using workgroups

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail data events on the S3 buckets and manually correlate each GetObject call to an Athena query

Answer

Configure a Glue crawler to scan the query result location in S3 and build a report of query sizes

Answer

Migrate all analysts to Redshift Spectrum so that scan costs are eliminated