Typical Application Scenarios

Cost Management

You can tag each cloud resource to track and manage costs effectively, improving the efficiency and convenience of enterprise financial management. Tags are also an important tool for financial departments to implement refined management. Tags can enable financial personnel to better understand, manage, and optimize enterprises' IT investment. This includes but is not limited to the following aspects:

1. More accurate cost control: Reasonable and standard tags enable financial personnel to accurately track the actual cost of each resource. This helps identify and optimize high-cost resource usage, thereby achieving cost savings.
2. More effective budget management: Financial personnel allocate cloud expenditures to specific budget categories, making budget formulation and adjustment more scientific and reasonable. This simplifies tracking real costs.
3. More transparent expense allocation: For a company with multiple departments or projects, tags enable costs to be directly associated with corresponding departments or projects, ensuring fair and transparent expense allocation. This simplifies internal cost tracking and offers transparent breakdowns for customer and stakeholder reports.
4. Simplified bill management and analysis: Tags can significantly simplify bill parsing and help financial personnel quickly understand and review bill content. Tags can also be used to analyze expenses thoroughly and pinpoint ways to cut costs.
5. More accurate decision-making: Accurate tag information provides a factual data foundation for executives, helping them make more informed investment decisions.

The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team should work with someone skilled in finances to create effective resource tag policies for cost and finance management.

Process of Using Tags to Manage Costs

• Create a tag rule.

  The CCoE team works with enterprise finance personnel to develop standardized tag naming rules. For example, the team sets keys and values of tags used for cost management based on the tag design principles by subsidiary, operating environment, department, business unit, and application system.

• Set a resource tag.

  Create a tag for each cloud resource based on the preceding tag naming rules. To prevent cloud resource operators from adding tags randomly, you can use tag policies provided by Huawei Cloud to enforce tag naming rules.

• Activate cost tags.

  Activate cost tags before classifying your cloud resource costs by categories like usage, environment, or department.

  For details, see Activating Cost Tags.

• Analyze and optimize costs.

  After cost tags are activated, go to the Cost Analysis page to summarize and filter cost data by cost tag. The CCoE team can identify idle or overused resources using tags and optimize costs accordingly.

O&M Management

Tags are an important part of cloud O&M practices. They can improve work efficiency and help cloud O&M teams better control complex IT environments. Tags are important for cloud O&M in the following aspects:

• Simplified resource management: Tags allow O&M personnel to manage and organize cloud resources in a more flexible manner. For example, resources can be classified by project, environment (like development, test, or production), owner, or cost center for better visibility and management.
• Lifecycle management: Resource lifecycle information is tagged to simplify planning for starting or removing resources and help O&M personnel manage resources effectively.
• Compliance and security: Security operations personnel can add tags for resources based on application data sensitivity levels. This ensures applications and data comply with all relevant security and privacy regulations or internal/external audit requirements.
• Troubleshooting assistance: O&M personnel can use tags to quickly locate affected resources, accelerating problem diagnosis and resolution.
• O&M automation assistance: O&M personnel can compile scripts or configure rules based on standard tags to implement automation tasks. For example, instances with specific tags are automatically started or stopped, or resources with deletion tags are periodically released. This significantly reduces the need for manual intervention and reduces the risk of human errors.
• Performance optimization assistance: O&M personnel can add key metrics like CPU and memory usage to tags to remind related personnel to take actions for performance optimization.
• Security hardening assistance: O&M personnel can assign security policy implementation permissions based on tags to ensure that only authorized users can access or operate certain sensitive resources.
• Disaster recovery assistance: Tags can be created for applications that need to be quickly restored during disaster recovery to ensure that these applications can be restarted immediately after a disaster occurs.