Today, Vantage announces the general availability of GitHub Costs Support, allowing Vantage customers to track costs for GitHub services, such as Actions, Shared Storage, and Copilot seats in one place. The GitHub integration can be enabled under General Settings and Integrations in the navigation sidebar. Customers grant billing access to a Vantage-owned email address so that Vantage can ingest the detailed usage report CSV for the most granular visibility into Actions usage.
Previously, customers struggled to observe their GitHub costs; the billing APIs provided insufficient granularity, and the generated CSVs required manual download and review. Often, customers did not track their GitHub usage at all throughout the month, and they looked at their bill only at the end of the month. In addition, customers that used self-managed runners, including those that run on Kubernetes or on virtual machines, found it difficult to associate these compute costs with their overall GitHub spend. Allocating build costs by repository, user, or organization was not possible through the GitHub-provided tooling without time-consuming and manual effort.
Cost Report with GitHub costs grouped by repo and username
Now, with the launch of GitHub Costs Support in Vantage, customers can grant Vantage access to their GitHub billing data by inviting a Vantage-owned email address as a billing administrator to their Enterprise. This billing user allows Vantage to download the detailed usage CSV for maximum billing granularity for GitHub Actions, Storage, and Copilot. For example, customers can see per-user, repository, and workflow-level billing for Actions builds, as well as the detailed usage report for GitHub Enterprise, which enables tracking the license usage of Enterprise members.
This feature is now available to all Vantage customers. To get started, navigate to the Integrations page, in the console, and select GitHub. To learn more about how to get set up, see the Vantage documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today, Vantage is launching GitHub Costs Support, an integration that enables tracking of costs for GitHub Actions, Shared Storage, and Copilot seats.
In addition to these services, customers can also use existing Vantage tagging capabilities to track the underlying compute costs for self-hosted runners that run on a virtual machine, such as an EC2 instance, or in Kubernetes. You can also view the explainer video below for more details.
2. Who can use GitHub Costs in Vantage?
Any Vantage customer that is using GitHub services today can use this integration.
3. How does the GitHub Costs integration in Vantage work?
First, customers will grant Vantage manage billing:enterprise or read:org access to the GitHub API, allowing Vantage to query the API for billing data returned from the “get usage billing report for an enterprise” API.
Next, customers need to invite an account-specific Vantage email address as a billing manager to their Enterprise or Organization. There is no license fee for inviting this user. After the Vantage user is invited, Vantage will confirm the addition of the user to the customer’s account within 24 hours. With this approach, Vantage can automatically pull the detailed usage report (CSV) from GitHub. After this, customers can add the GitHub integration to their Vantage account from the General Settings → Integrations navigation heading.
With the information in the detailed usage report CSV, customers can see granular usage breakdowns for GitHub Actions, such as build minutes by user, repo, and workflow, as well as the associated infrastructure used to perform the build. This is currently the most detailed method to provide the information that’s needed for this integration.
4. What details are provided by allowing Vantage to ingest the GitHub Actions Usage Report CSV?
The Usage Report CSV contains metadata about every GitHub Actions build for the billing period. The CSV includes the user that initiated the build, the organization the user belongs to, the associated source code repository, the workflow name, the runner type, size, and operating system.
With this additional metadata, Vantage can help customers understand the users or repositories that are using the most minutes. This can help identify anomalies, build/test issues, and over-provisioned runners. Vantage customers can create filters for any of the metadata provided in the CSV.
5. How can I allocate the infrastructure costs for my self-hosted runners?
Customers can create a Cost Report that includes both GitHub Costs and the EC2 or EKS costs, based on tags or labels.
6. What can I filter GitHub costs by in Cost Reports?
On Cost Reports, you can filter and group by the following options for GitHub.
- Category (e.g., Actions - Hosted Runner)
- Tag:
- owner
- repo
- username
- workflow
- Subcategory (e.g., Actions - Compute - UBUNTU_16_Core)
- Resource (e.g., Actions - specific Actions workflow)
- Charge Type (e.g., Usage)
- Organization (organization name)
- Service (Actions, Storage, and Copilot)
7. How much does this integration cost?
There is no additional cost for GitHub support; however, GitHub costs will be included in quota tier enforcement. In the event that your GitHub costs push you over your current tier limit, you may be prompted to upgrade. For details on pricing, see the Pricing page.
8. What other cloud service providers is Vantage adding?
Vantage is planning on adding support for fly.io, ClickHouse, and Vercel. Please contact support@vantage.sh with other providers you’d like to see added.
9. Will historical cost data for GitHub be available?
Yes, when following the integration setup, you will be configuring 180 days of historical usage data from GitHub.
10. Will GitHub costs be represented in the Overview page?
Yes, GitHub costs are represented in the Overview page and present in the Provider Summary widget.
11. I’ve just added a GitHub integration. How long will it take for my cost data to be present in the Vantage console?
Vantage will begin ingesting and processing costs as soon as we approve the addition of the Vantage billing user to your Enterprise. As soon as they are processed, they will be available on your “All Resources” Cost Report.
12. How often does GitHub data refresh in the Vantage console?
GitHub data refreshes daily in the Vantage console.
13. What happens if I remove a GitHub integration?
If you decide to remove your GitHub integration from Vantage, all costs associated with your GitHub API token will be removed from the Vantage console.
