Cost Groups

Overview

A Cost Group in OCTO is a powerful feature that provides a customized view of your cloud costs and usage. They are essentially filters that allow you to break down your cloud expenses according to various dimensions, offering a granular perspective on your spending.

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Understanding Combinations in Cost Groups

What are Combinations?

Combinations are the fundamental building blocks of Cost Groups in OCTO. They enable users to customize which accounts, services, regions, usage, instance, availability zone, API operation, invoice, tags and resources are included in a specific cost group by defining precise filtering criteria. Think of combinations as advanced filters that let you break down and analyze your cloud costs across multiple dimensions and providers.

As cloud computing expanded, managing costs across multiple services and providers became increasingly complex. Many organizations struggle to control spending and use resources efficiently as their cloud usage grows. Monitoring and organizing resources across different platforms can be difficult and time-consuming. OCTO simplifies this process with combinations, allowing for smarter and more efficient cost management.

How Combinations Work

Combinations work across all three cost group creation methods:

• Manual Creation: Direct attribute selection using combinations of vendor, account, service, region, usage type, instance, availability zone, API operation, invoice and tags.
• AI-Cost Group: Pre-configured combinations focused on AI and ML services across cloud providers. For detailed instructions, refer to AI Cost documentation.
• Container-Cost Group: Specialized combinations for containerized workloads and Kubernetes environments. To learn how to set this up, visit Container Cost guide.

In the combination interface, you'll find:

• Vendors: Support for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Attributes: Specific resources within each category that can be included or excluded. Options including account, product/service, region, usage types, instance, availability zone, API operation, invoice and tags.
• Operations: Logical operators (is, is not, AND, OR) to create advanced filtering rules.

Creating Combinations

When creating any type of cost group, you'll work with combinations to define your filtering criteria:

1. Select Vendor: Choose from AWS, Azure, or GCP.
2. Choose Attributes: Specify which resources to include or exclude. Pick from account, product/service, region, usage types, instance, availability zone, API operation, invoice and tags.
3. Apply Operations: Use logical operators to create advance rules.
4. Combine Multiple Filters: Layer different combinations for precise cost grouping.

The chosen category and attributes determine which resources will be included in your cost group. You can refine your selection by specifying subjects, choosing from all available options or selecting specific accounts, products, regions, tags, and other attributes based on your registered cloud accounts and requirements.

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Managing Cost Groups

Cost Groups is a key feature in OCTO as discussed in this article. This section covers how to manage your cost groups efficiently, including how to create, edit, remove, and view cost groups.

Note: Only Admin accounts can create, edit, and remove cost groups.

Creating a Cost Group

Head to the left side panel section and select Cost Group.

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Step 1: Create a New Cost Group

• Click on + CREATE COST GROUP to start.

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Step 2: Select a Cost Group Type

Select the type of Cost Group you want to create. The steps below show how to create a Manual Creation cost group, which is the default option and gives you full control over your cost group configuration.

Manual Creation

Choose Manual Creation to have full control over which AWS or cloud resources to include.

This option allows you to manually select cloud assets by applying filters based on multiple attributes and operations to create precise cost groupings.

Define Cost Group Details

Provide a name and description for the cost group, then customize it by selecting an avatar and color.

Add Filters

Select from the available attributes and combine them using logical operations to define your cost group criteria:

Attribute	Example Value	Description
Account ID	123456789012	AWS account number
Service	Amazon EC2, Amazon S3	AWS services
Region	us-east-1, ap-southeast-1	AWS region
Usage Type	BoxUsage:m5.large	Type of usage measured
Instance Type	t3.micro, m5.large	EC2 instance types
Availability Zone	us-east-1a	Specific zone within the selected region
API Operation	RunInstances, GetObject	The AWS API request performed
Invoice ID	1234-5678	Invoice identifier for cost grouping

Available Operations: Use these logical operators to create advance filtering rules:

• is (exact match)
• is not (exclude match)
• AND (combine multiple conditions that must all be true)
• OR (combine multiple conditions where at least one must be true)

Optional: Add Tag Filters

Add Tag Filters to include/exclude resources based on cost allocation tags such as:

• Environment = Production
• Project = Alpha

Change Cloud Provider

If you need to modify your cloud provider selection during the setup process:

Delete Current Provider: Click the trash icon to remove and change the current cloud provider or vendor.

Add New Provider: Click the +Add Provider button to select a different cloud provider.

Select and Confirm: Choose your desired provider from the available options and click the Confirm button to apply the changes.

Click CREATE COST GROUP to finalize the cost group setup.

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Viewing a Cost Group

Once your cost group is created, click on it to view comprehensive insights and analytics. The Cost Group dashboard provides multiple ways to analyze and understand your cloud spending:

Time Range Filtering

Filter your cost data by different time periods (daily, monthly, or custom range) to analyze spending patterns over specific timeframes.

Cost Visualization Graphs

View your cost data through various chart types and visualizations to better understand spending trends and patterns:

Filtering and Grouping Options

Customize your cost analysis by applying additional filters and grouping data by different dimensions such as account, product/service, region, usage type, charge type, billing account, category and vendor.

Edit and Delete Cost Group

Only Admin OCTO accounts can edit cost groups which can then edit combinations and change anomaly threshold. Click the Action button and now you can select between editing the combination info, the combination itself, change anomaly threshold, or delete it.