Set Up Cost Analytics

To use Commander cost analytics, carry out the following tasks:

  1. Configure the Default Ownership policy, so that ownership is applied to costs. See Cost analytics and ownership below.
  2. For public clouds, you must retrieve billing data in order to see cost analytics. See AWS, Azure, and GCP for procedures to retrieve billing.

    A message appears at the top of the Cost Analytics page if billing retrieval isn't configured for any clouds.

  3. (Optional, for upgrades only) If you want to immediately migrate the past 60 days of pre-upgrade billing data, edit the schedule for the database maintenance task. For more information, see Schedule Database Maintenance Task.
  4. Grant permissions to Service Portal users who need to view cost analytics.

Since some public cloud providers complete their final billing records after a delay, the most recent cost shown on Cost Analytics charts is for the day before yesterday. You'll still see a bar for yesterday's costs, but the amount will be zero. For AWS, costs are retrieved daily throughout the month and the retrieval continues until the end of the next month in order to incorporate any late billing adjustments. For example, the cost for June 5 will be retrieved on June 7 and throughout the month of June, and all through the month of July. This setting can be controlled by a system property, but the behavior described here is the default.

For private clouds, the costs shown are based on estimated cost metrics.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, or if no costs are visible, see Troubleshooting Cost Analytics.

Cost analytics and ownership

For accurate Cost Analytics information, you must assign ownership to services.

To learn how to assign ownership to existing services, see Set Resource Ownership. To learn how to configure the ownership policy, see Set Resource Ownership with Policies.

How Commander determines ownership of unmanaged public cloud services

When you retrieve public cloud billing data, Commander cost analytics includes costs for types of services it does not manage. In order to display accurate cost analytics, Commander assigns an owner to these costs. The order of precedence that Commander uses to determine the ownership of unmanaged services varies for each public cloud. Once ownership information is found in one of these checks, no further ownership checks are made.

For AWS:

  1. Commander first checks the AWS Auto Scaling group that the service belongs to and uses its ownership.
  2. Next, Commander checks the stack that the service belongs to and uses its ownership.
  3. Next, Commander checks the ownership policy to determine the ownership.

    4. AWS billing records do not contain (VPC) Virtual Private Cloud information, so any ownership assigned at the VPC level cannot be applied.

For Azure:

  1. Commander first checks the resource group that the service belongs to and uses its ownership.
  2. Next, Commander checks the ownership policy to determine the ownership.

For GCP:

  • GCP provides costs at the project level, not at the level of the specific resource. Because Commander does not allow you to manually assign ownership to GCP projects, you must configure an ownership policy to assign ownership (see Set Resource Ownership with Policies). Through the ownership policy, you can assign ownership at the level of the cloud account, organization, folder, project, region or zone.