Cost Management

Cost Composition

CFW costs consist of two parts: resources and resource packages. For details about CFW billing items, see Billing Items.

Cost Allocation

A good cost accountability system is a prerequisite for cost management. It ensures that departments, business teams, and owners are accountable for their respective cloud costs. An enterprise can allocate cloud costs to different teams or projects so as to have a clear picture of their respective costs.

Huawei Cloud Cost Center provides various tools for you to group costs in different ways. You can experiment with these tools and find a way that works best for you.

• By linked account

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

• By enterprise project

  Before allocating costs, enable Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) and plan your enterprise projects based on your organizational structure or service needs. When purchasing cloud resources, select an enterprise project so that the costs of the resources will be allocated to the selected enterprise project. For details, see Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project.

  Figure 1 Selecting an enterprise project
  
• 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 (recommended).

  1. Add a predefined tag.

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

  2. Activate 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 CFW resources.
     On the page for purchasing a CFW instance, you can select a created predefined tag.

     Figure 2 Adding a tag
     
  4. View cost data by the cost tag.

     For details, see Viewing Costs by Cost Tag.

  For details, see Creating Predefined Tags.

• Allocate costs by cost category.

  You can use Cost Categories provided by 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 they cannot be categorized into a singular cost type. 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 your original costs and amortized costs using various dimensions and display filters for cost analysis so that you can analyze the trends and drivers of your service usage and costs from a variety of perspectives or within different defined scopes.

You can also use Cost Anomaly Detection provided by 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 specify recipients to receive budget alerts if any at a frequency you configured.

  Suppose you want to create a monthly budget of $2000 USD for CFW resources and expect to receive an alert if the forecasted amount exceeds 80% of the budgeted amount. You can refer to the following budget information.

  Figure 3 Basic budget information
  
  Figure 4 Defining the budget scope
  
  Figure 5 Setting a budget alert
  

  For details, see Enabling Forecasting and Creating Budgets to Track Cost and Usage.

• Resource rightsizing

  The cost center can monitor the historical usage of CFW resources and provide customers with idle CFW resources identification and optimization suggestions to find cost saving opportunities. You can also identify resources with high costs based on the analysis results in the Cost Analysis phase and use Cloud Eye to monitor resource usage. By doing this, you can 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.