Introduction

Allocation allows organizations to accurately attribute costs to relevant business units, applications, or projects. A well-defined allocation strategy helps prompt financial accountability and transparency, laying a solid foundation for cloud financial management.

When defining the Allocation capability, the FinOps Foundation lists three primary strategies: allocation strategy, tagging strategy, and shared cost strategy. The DoiT Allocations feature mainly deals with allocation strategy and shared cost strategy.

Allocation rules

Allocations are defined with allocation rules. Each rule identifies a grouping of cloud resources based on the applied Dimensions, labels, and tags. Depending on the number of rules included, allocations are categorized as single-rule and group allocations.

Single-rule allocations

A single-rule allocation defines a grouping of cloud resources. You can use single-rule allocations to:

• Track usage and cost of a particular grouping using Cloud Analytics reports.

• Measure indicators and operational data specific to your business by creating custom metrics.

• Get notified of important events and conditions of a grouping via Alerts.

• Define the scope of Budgets. For example, a budget for a team or a product.

• Monitor Cost anomalies in a subset of your overall cloud spend.

• Receive daily or weekly email Digests on the spend of a grouping.

• Provide a focused Cloud Analytics experience based on Organizations.

Group allocations

Group allocations are used to segment shared data among multiple groupings. For example, to divide cost and usage data among different teams or environments.

• A group allocation always contains a pre-defined Unallocated rule, which captures data that cannot be attributed to specific members within the group.

• In addition to the Unallocated rule, a group allocation must contain at least one other allocation rule.

• Data shared by more than one grouping is assigned to the allocation rule that appears earlier in the group.

The diagram below illustrates the main concepts of group allocations.

In the diagram:

• Data is distributed among groupings defined by Allocation rule 1, Allocation rule 2, Allocation rule 3, and Unallocated.

• Data shared by Allocation rule 1 and Allocation rule 2 goes to the grouping defined by Allocation rule 1.

See also

• Tutorial: Allocate costs

• Tutorial: Split costs