Getting Started with Cost Center

Confirming Your Cost Allocation Method

In Cost Center, there are three ways to allocate cost data: Organization Management, Cost Tags, and Enterprise Projects. You are advised to decide which method you plan to use as early as possible. For details, see Confirming Your Cost Allocation Method.

Using Grouping Tools to View Costs

• Viewing Costs by Linked Account: If you are using an enterprise master account, you can view your own costs and the costs of your member accounts by linked account.
• Viewing Costs by Enterprise Project: If you have enabled the Enterprise Project function, you can view your costs by enterprise project.
• Viewing Costs by Cost Tag: If you have created and activated cost tags, you can view your costs by cost tag.
• Viewing Costs By Cost Category: If Linked Account, Enterprise Project, and Cost Tags cannot meet your cost allocation requirements, you can use cost categories to define cost splitting rules and then view your costs based on these rules.
• Viewing Split CDN Costs: If you have monthly-settled Content Delivery Network (CDN) expenditures billed by traffic, you can view your costs by domain name.

Making Cost Analysis to Explore Costs and Usage

You can track costs and usage in the following ways:

• Preconfigured Analysis Reports: Cost Center comes with several report types preconfigured with commonly used data display filters. You can explore your cost and usage data in analysis reports.
• Custom Analysis Reports: You can save your analysis results in a custom report so that you can run the same analysis again later if needed.
• Cost Tags: You can use cost tags to manage resources and activate them as needed to track your cloud costs.
• Cost Details: Cost Center provides you with amortized cost details, which can be exported as needed for further analysis.
• Forecasting: Cost and usage can be forecasted based on the cost analysis.

Creating Forecasts and Budgets to Track Costs and Usage

• Creating Budgets and Configuring Alerts: After Forecasting is enabled, you can view forecasted costs and usage in the cost analyses, and set budget alerts based on the forecasting results.
• Using Reports to Track Your Budget: You can create a budget report so that Cost Center will periodically email the report to you on a schedule that you configured.

Enabling Cost Anomaly Detection to Identify Anomalies

• Enabling Cost Anomaly Detection to Identify Anomalies: After you create a monitor, Cost Center applies its detection rules to identify cost anomalies and report them in a timely manner.

Changing Billing Modes to Optimize Costs

You can optimize your costs in the following ways:

• Evaluating Cost Optimization Option of Changing the Billing Mode from Pay-per-Use to Yearly/Monthly: If you want to use pay-per-use products for an extended period, you might want to consider changing the billing mode from pay-per-use to yearly/monthly to reduce costs. With this option, Cost Center analyzes the usage of your pay-per-use resources and identifies places where you can save money.
• Analyzing RI Utilization and Coverage: Cost Center analyzes the utilization of reserved instances (RIs) you purchased. If your RIs are underutilized, you may have purchased too many. If the coverage of your RIs is too low, you may have under-purchased RIs. By analyzing your usage patterns, you can determine whether you need to adjust your plan on purchasing RIs for the next period.