Split costs

The FinOps cost allocation capability 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. In a report, you can split:

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

  In Cloud Analytics, unallocated costs refer to the cost that cannot be attributed to specific members in a predefined group. See Group allocations.

• 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 a group allocation.

  注意

  It's not allowed to split costs by allocation rules directly. You have to add the rules to a group allocation.

Cost splits are part of a report's configuration: they apply to the report where you define them and don't change how other reports present the same data.

Distribution methods

DoiT supports the following methods of distributing the split cost to the target items:

Method	Description
Custom	Manually define the proportion of cost distributed to each target item, or distribute the cost evenly.
Proportional	Distribute the cost in proportion to each target item's share of the total value in the report.
Driver metric	Distribute the cost in proportion to an operational metric (for example, database IOPS per team), recalculated for each time bucket of the report.

注意

The driver metric method is an early access feature. See Early access features.

Required permissions

• Cloud Analytics User

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

Split costs in a report

The overall workflow is the same for all distribution methods:

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

   

2. Select the source item whose cost you want to split.

   

3. Select the checkboxes of items among which the cost will be distributed, and specify the distribution method.

4. Select Split cost and run the report to view the results.

See the following pages for a detailed walkthrough of each distribution method:

📄️Custom split

Split costs using manually defined percentages.

📄️Proportional split

Split costs in proportion to each target's share of the total cost.

📄️Driver metric split

Split costs in proportion to an operational metric, such as database IOPS per team.