Allocate a portion of shared costs by setting a showback percentage
Today Vantage announces the launch of percentage based cost allocation in Cost Reports. When creating filters, customers can now optionally choose to allocate only a percentage of cloud costs to appear on a Cost Report.
Before, Vantage gave customers the ability to create multiple filtering conditions through the use of -AND- and -OR- logic. As often as costs met these conditions, they would be represented in full in a Cost Report. However, the filtering logic didn’t give a way to allocate only a portion of these costs to a Cost Report making it difficult for shared resources (such as shared databases or support bills) to be allocated to a specific team or service.
Using Cost Allocation Percentages to split usage
Now there is an additional, optional “Cost Allocation” field present for each Filter Set that customers can adjust in their cost reports. This gives them the ability to allocate a percentage (1 to 100 percent) for a specific resource or set of resources to be attributed to a cost report. There are two examples we’ve heard from customers for using percentage based allocation:
- Allocating only a percentage of a shared RDS instance alongside specific Kubernetes services. For example, its very common for an engineering team to be responsible for a specific Kubernetes service and leverage a shared RDS instance. Now, customers can create a Cost Report on Vantage with a specific Kubernetes service and only a small percentage of a shared RDS instance.
- Allocating a shared Support bill to each of their member accounts where each member account represents one of their engineering teams. Rather than seeing one large Support bill in aggregate, customers can now allocate only a percentage of it based upon the number of member accounts in their organization.
Percentage Based Allocation is available for free to all Vantage users, including users in the free tier, at the time that this blog post is published. To learn more about how Percent Based Cost Allocation works, head to the documentation page on Cost Reports.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today we are are launching Percentage Based Allocation in Cost Reports. This gives customers the ability to “showback” costs of certain shared resources they’re consuming. As customers are using Filter Sets to create reports for certain sets of costs they’ll have an optional “percentage” field where they can input a value of 1-100%. In the event that a percentage is set on a cost report filter, Vantage will display that accordingly.
2. Who is the customer?
The customer is any Vantage user who has shared costs that they wish to “showback” in a Cost Report.
3. How much does this cost?
There is no additional cost to percentage based cost allocation. It is available to users in all tiers, including the free tier.
4. How does percentage based cost allocation work?
As filters are set in a cost report, Vantage will query for costs that meet all of those conditions. In the event that a percentage is set by the customer on a Filter Set, that percentage will be applied to all of the matching costs and represented accordingly in the Cost Report.
5. How do I create a cost report that leverages percentage based cost allocation?
To use Percentage Based Allocation, you can do the following:
- Head to any saved Cost Report
- Click “Filters”
- Configure filters to see a subset of costs. For example, see the costs just for RDS.
- Click the new “Add Cost Allocation” option on that filter set and set a value of 1-100%.
- Save the report.
6. How does forecasting work with cost reports with percentage based cost allocation?
Forecasting will work just as before. Forecasts for costs with percentage allocations applied will take the allocation into consideration.
7. Can I create a cost report that has multiple Filter Sets that leverage Percentage based cost allocation?
Yes. Percentage based allocation is defined on a per-Filter-Set basis so you can chain together as many Filter Sets with percentage based allocation as you’d like.
8. Will there be API support for this?
Yes. The costs that are retrieved from Cost Reports that leverage percentage based cost allocation will have those associated costs represented in the data available via the API. There are no structural changes to the API - the data will just be represented accordingly.
9. Will this impact reports that I receive via E-Mail, Slack or Microsoft Teams?
Yes. In the event that you adjust a cost report to use percent based cost allocation, it will impact the data received in these reports.
10. How are percentage based allocations applied to discounts, credits and refunds?
Charges with negative amounts will be allocated in the same manner as usage. For instance a $10,000 credit with 20% allocation will be $2,000 on the cost report.
