Cost Management

Cost Composition

When using EdgeSec, you will use some resources, which depend on billing items of EdgeSec you are using. For details, 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.

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

• Allocate costs 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.

• Allocate costs by cost category.

  You can use Cost Categories in Cost Center to split shared costs. Shared costs are the costs of 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. 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 precisely 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 specify recipients to receive budget alerts if any at a frequency you configured.

  For example, an enterprise needs to create a cost budget for EdgeSec. The monthly budget is $2,000 USD. The system should send an alarm when the forecast amount is greater than 80% of the budget amount. You can refer to the following budget information.

  Figure 1 Basic budget information
  
  Figure 2 Defining the budget scope
  
  Figure 3 Setting a budget alert
  

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

• Resource optimization

  Cost Center analyzes your historical CPU and other resource usage to identify idle EdgeSec resources and generate resource rightsizing recommendations. These rightsizing opportunities are places where you can reduce costs. 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.