Chapter 3. Next steps for managing your costs

After adding your OpenShift Container Platform and Amazon Web Services data, in addition to showing cost data by integration, cost management will automatically show AWS cost and usage related to running your OpenShift Container Platform clusters on their platform.

On the cost management Overview page, your cost data is sorted into OpenShift and Infrastructure tabs. Select Perspective to toggle through different views of your cost data.

You can also use the global navigation menu to view additional details about your costs by cloud provider.

Additional resources

3.1. Limiting access to cost management resources

After you add and configure integrations in cost management, you can limit access to cost data and resources.

You might not want users to have access to all of your cost data. Instead, you can grant users access only to data that is specific to their projects or organizations. With role-based access control, you can limit the visibility of resources in cost management reports. For example, you can restrict a user’s view to only AWS integrations, rather than the entire environment.

To learn how to limit access, see the more in-depth guide Limiting access to cost management resources.

3.2. Configuring tagging for your integrations

The cost management application tracks cloud and infrastructure costs with tags. Tags are also known as labels in OpenShift.

You can refine tags in cost management to filter and attribute resources, organize your resources by cost, and allocate costs to different parts of your cloud infrastructure.

Important

You can only configure tags and labels directly on an integration. You can choose the tags that you activate in cost management, however, you cannot edit tags and labels in the cost management application.

To learn more about the following topics, see Managing cost data using tagging:

  • Planning your tagging strategy to organize your view of cost data
  • Understanding how cost management associates tags
  • Configuring tags and labels on your integrations

3.3. Configuring cost models to accurately report costs

Now that you configured your integrations to collect cost and usage data in cost management, you can configure cost models to associate prices to metrics and usage.

A cost model is a framework that uses raw costs and metrics to define calculations for the costs in cost management. You can record, categorize, and distribute the costs that the cost model generates to specific customers, business units, or projects.

In Cost Models, you can complete the following tasks:

  • Classifying your costs as infrastructure or supplementary costs
  • Capturing monthly costs for OpenShift nodes and clusters
  • Applying a markup to account for additional support costs

To learn how to configure a cost model, see Using cost models.

3.4. Visualizing your costs with Cost Explorer

Use cost management Cost Explorer to create custom graphs of time-scaled cost and usage information and ultimately better visualize and interpret your costs.

To learn more about the following topics, see Visualizing your costs using Cost Explorer:

  • Using Cost Explorer to identify abnormal events
  • Understanding how your cost data changes over time
  • Creating custom bar charts of your cost and usage data
  • Exporting custom cost data tables