Split costs

Overview

The FinOps cost allocation capability prompts accountability among teams and projects within an organization. It deals with how cloud costs should be apportioned to those responsible for each component of that cost, whether directly or as a shared element.

Shared costs in most organizations come from support costs, networking services, or shared environments (platforms, containers, etc.). When defining an allocation strategy, it's important to include a shared cost strategy that specifies the need to share any subsets of cost among allocation targets, and the mechanisms to share costs for each shared cost item.

The practice of sharing costs is also called cost splitting. DoiT Cloud Analytics supports the following cost splitting options:

• Cost splitting types:

  • Split unallocated costs that are incurred by services or resources shared among multiple organizational units and cannot be attributed directly to a single owner.

    In DoiT Cloud Analytics, unallocated costs refer to the cost that cannot be attributed to specifc members in a predefined group. See Attribution groups: Concepts.

  • Split the cost of one dimension value among others of the same dimension. This option is more flexible and allows you to split costs on the fly without having to create an attribution group.

    Note

    It's not allowed to split costs by attributions directly. To split costs among attributions, you have to add them to an attribution group.

• Distribution methods:

  • Evenly split: To distribute the cost evenly between the target items.

  • Proportional: To distribute the cost in proportion to the total value of each target item on the report.

  • Custom: To manually define the proportions of cost distributed to the target items.

Required permissions

• Cloud Analytics

• Depending on the dimensions you choose, you may need other permissions in your DoiT account.

Split unallocated costs

DoiT Cloud Analytics supports splitting unallocated costs among resource groups (defined by attribution) using an attribution group.

Identify unallocated costs

The example below demonstrates how to find out the costs not assigned to a specific environment:

1. Create two new attributions, one for the Production environment, the other for the Development environment. See Create attributions.

   Tip

   Environments are typically defined using Hierarchy groups dimensions.

2. Create an attribution group named Environments with the two environment attributions.

3. Go to the main Reports screen to create a new report.

4. In the Group by section, add the newly created attribution group Environments.

5. Run the report to see how the costs are allocated.

   

Break down unallocated costs

You can add other dimensions to better understand the unallocated costs.

Split costs

The example below shows how to split unallocated cost in the Environments attribution group:

1. In the left-hand sidebar of the report, go to the Group by section and select the three dots menu (⋮) at the rightmost end of the attribution group, and then select Split new cost.

   

2. Select Unallocated as the source item to split.

3. Select the target items to which the unallocated cost will be assigned.

4. Specify the distribution method: Evenly split, Proportional, or Custom.

5. Select Split Cost.

6. Run report to view the results of cost redistribution.

   You'll see an extra column (- origin) with a breakdown of the redistributed cost. You can use Hide detailed breakdown to remove it.

   Evenly split:

   

   Proportional:

   In the current example, the unallocated cost distributed to the Development environment is calculated as below:

   Unallocated_total × (Development_origin / (Development_origin + Production_origin) )

   

Split the cost of one dimension value

The example below shows how to distribute the cost of one AWS service to others:

1. Create a new report that shows the top five Amazon Web Services by cost in the last month.

2. In the Group by section, select the three dots menu (⋮) at the rightmost end of the Service dimension, and then select Split new cost.

   

3. Select AWS Support (Enterprise) as the source item to split.

4. Select the other four services as the target items to distribute the support cost.

5. Specify the distribution method as Evenly split, and then select Split Cost.

6. Run report to view the results of cost redistribution.