Cost Management

Cost Composition

The costs of using WAF depend on the service edition and resource packages you use. Billing items are different for each edition. For details, see Billing Items.

Figure 1 WAF Costs

Cost Allocation

A good cost accountability system is the basis of cloud financial management. It ensures that departments, business teams, and owners are accountable for their respective cloud costs. Allocate costs to different teams or projects so that organizations have a clear picture of their respective costs.

We provide multiple tools for you to optimize cost allocation in Cost Center.

• Allocate costs by linked account.

  The enterprise master account can categorize the costs of its member accounts by linked account to manage the accounting of those member accounts. For details, see Viewing Costs by Linked Account.

• Allocate costs by enterprise project.

  Before allocating costs, enable Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) and plan your enterprise projects based on your organizational structure or businesses. Select an enterprise project for a newly purchased cloud resource so that the costs of that resource will be allocated to the selected enterprise project. For details, see Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project.

  All WAF billing items can be allocated by enterprise projects.

  1. Enable Enterprise Project.

     Complete real-name authentication, and then enable Enterprise Project. For details, see Enabling the Enterprise Project Function.

  2. Create an enterprise project.

     Create an enterprise project based on your department or business needs. For details, see Creating an Enterprise Project.

  3. Select an enterprise project when purchasing WAF.
     Select an enterprise project in the Enabled state for a newly purchased WAF instance so that the costs of the WAF instance will be allocated based on the selected enterprise project.

     Figure 2 Enterprise Project
     
  4. Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project

     When viewing cost data by enterprise project, you are advised to summarize data based on amortized costs. For details, see Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project.

• Allocate costs by cost tag.

  Huawei Cloud assigns tags to your cloud resources so they can be sorted in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. The following is the process of managing costs by predefined tags. For WAF, only the fees of all billing items in dedicated mode can be managed using tags. The procedure is as follows:

  1. Adding a predefined tag

     Go to the TMS console and create predefined tags. For details, see Creating Predefined Tags.

  2. Activating cost tags

     For details, see Activating Cost Tags. You can view activated cost tags on the Cost Analysis or Budgets page.

     If you activate some tags, they will be used to organize your resource costs generated thereafter. If you want to use tags to analyze the cost data generated before tag activation, export the bill details file and analyze the data based on the Resource Tag field in the file.

  3. Add tags to WAF resources.
     On the page for purchasing a WAF instance, select a created predefined tag.

     Figure 3 Adding a tag
     
  4. View cost data by the cost tag.

     For details, see Viewing Costs by Cost Tag.

• Allocate costs by cost category.

  You can use Cost Categories in Cost Center to split shared costs. Shared costs include the costs for the resources (compute, network, storage, or resource packages) shared across multiple departments or the costs that cannot be directly split by cost tag or enterprise project configured for the resources. These costs are not directly attributable to a singular owner, and hence cannot be categorized into a singular cost category. In this case, you can define cost splitting rules to fairly allocate these costs among teams or business units. For details, see Viewing Cost By Cost Category.

Cost Analysis

To accurately control and optimize your costs, you need a clear understanding of what parts of your enterprise incurred different costs. Cost Center visualizes original costs and amortized costs in various dimensions and through filters so that you can analyze service usage costs, trends, and factors from a variety of perspectives and scopes.

You can also use Cost Anomaly Detection in Cost Center to detect unexpected expenses in a timely manner. In this way, costs can be monitored, analyzed, and traced.

For details, see Performing Cost Analysis to Explore Costs and Usage and Enabling Cost Anomaly Detection to Identify Anomalies.

Cost Optimization

• Cost control

  You can create different types of budgets on the Budgets page of Cost Center to track your costs against the budgeted amount you specified and send alerts to the recipients you configured if the thresholds you defined are reached. You can also create budget reports and Huawei Cloud will periodically generate and send to the recipients you configured on a schedule you set.

  For example, an enterprise needs to create a quarterly cost budget for WAF. The quarterly budget is $5,000 USD. The system should send an alarm when the forecast amount is greater than 80% of the budget amount. Then, the created budget is as follows:

  Figure 4 Basic budget information
  
  Figure 5 Budget Scope
  
  Figure 6 Configure budget alerts
  

  For details, see Introduction.

• Resource optimization

  Cost Center can help monitor the historical expenditures and resource usage of the WAF service, identify idle resources, and provide optimization suggestions so that you can reduce costs as much as possible. You can also identify resources with high costs based on the analysis results in the cost analysis phase, use Cloud Eye to monitor resource usage, determine the causes of high costs, and take optimization measures accordingly.

Related Operations

Creating a Budget: You can create budget reminders based on daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly costs and resource usage. If your actual costs or usage exceeds the budget threshold you configured, you will receive an alert.