Monitor and analyze how your costs perform by understanding the different features offered on the cost dashboard.
The Cost Dashboard is an interactive, analytical tool that drives accountability for costs to the edge of the organization so teams are empowered to manage their cloud usage against a budget. Key features of the Costs page are:
View cost trends.
Analyze cost variance and budget compliance.
Identify the services contributing the most to costs.
View current and projected cost trends.
View detailed information about costs in the Invoice Line Items table.
The current month are current costs from the cloud providers to date. Cloud providers may generate additional cost items after the last day of the month. The additional costs will be included in the period indicated by the cloud provider.
Cost & Asset Management also supports cost allocation policies, where you can allocate a single cost item across one or more business entities such as customers, projects, departments, or divisions, so you can have a more exact representation of costs and can generate a more accurate chargeback report for shared resources.
Cost Dashboard components
To navigate the Costs Dashboard, it is important to understand the features, and widgets that contribute to understanding the data quickly and clearly.
When the cost dashboard page opens you find distinctive features that provide information regarding your costs. At the beginning of the dashboard, you find:
The type of corporate currency: The Corporate Currency is the single currency which is used to display all currency values in
View ingestion status: You can view the ingestion status related to specific provider cost data. When clicking this option, you can view a list of providers and ingestion status, you can click View All to navigate to the job page to see full details on job status. To learn more about jobs, go to: managing jobs.
The cost dashboard offers three sections where you can analyze and configure cost data, these sections are:
View cost trends: Monitor trends, cost variances and cost trends compared to budgets.
You can configure the Dashboard View for each section. On the tool bar of the dashboard view, you can select the specific data to analyze, and use: saved views, data sets and filters to specify the costs you want to view.
Saved Views
: A Saved View is a persisted filter that can be found on each dashboard. The All Costs view is the default view of the dashboard. All Costs include the full set of costs which you are authorized to view.The set of costs available to you are defined by your administrator. For more information about saved views, go to: Saved Views.
Data set
: Users can also view costs based on a predefined Data Set. A Data Set is defined by the administrator and can be defined by Dynamic Tags or Dynamic Resource Group. For more information on Dynamic Resource Groups and Dynamic Tags see: Dynamic Resource Groups.
Filters
: Use filters to analyze specific costs. Each selection defines the data available for analysis. As a filter selection is made, the data available in subsequent filter items is limited. For example, selecting a specific provider in the filter will limit the accounts to just those for the selected provider. The filters available are:
Provider
: Select one or more providers for cost analysis.
Billing account
: Select one or more billing accounts for cost analysis. Selecting one or more providers limits the available billing accounts to those associated with the selected providers.
Asset account
: Select one or more asset accounts for cost analysis. Selecting one or more providers or one or more billing accounts limits the available asset accounts to those associated with the selections.
Category
: Select one or more categories for cost analysis. Selecting one or more providers, one or more billing accounts, one or more asset accounts limits the available categories to those associated with the selections.
Categories are system defined groups of asset types. Administrators can modify how asset types are associated to a category. See Asset Categorization for more information.
Asset type
: Select one or more asset types for cost analysis. Selecting one or more providers, one or more billing accounts, one or more asset accounts or one or more categories will limit the available asset types0 to those associated with the selections. Asset types are defined by the cloud provider.
Provider Tag: Users can search and select cloud provider tags associated costs. When adding characters on the text box data related to all cost items and tag value that match the tag key are shown. When searching for more than one tag key, you can use the logical operation as required. Two or more tag keys can be searched at the same time using the 'AND’ operator. You can also look for different tags by using the ‘OR’ option.
Once a Saved View, Data Set or Filter is selected, on the Dashboard view next to the filter tab, all selected criteria is shown in different colors. You can click the criteria to edit it or remove it.
Configuring dashboard
The dashboard has a feature to move sections up or down or collapse the section entirely to organize and display the most important content. Configurable sections include arrows and a dash to control movement or to collapse the section.
To move a section up, click the
Up Arrow
located on the right side of the configurable section.
To move a section down, click the
Down Arrow
located on the right side of the configurable section.
To collapse the section, click
Dash
on the right side of the configurable section. Once a section has been collapsed, the dash icon will change to a plus. To expand the section, click on the plus.
The configuration will be persisted and displayed until changed. The configuration can be changed at any time.