Help Center/ Cost Center/ Hands-On Tutorials/ Familiarizing Yourself with Basic Functions in Minutes
Updated on 2024-07-30 GMT+08:00

Familiarizing Yourself with Basic Functions in Minutes

You can get started with various cost management tools to meet your financial management requirements. The following covers some basic functions of Cost Center to help you familiarize yourself with cloud financial management.

Overview

The following figure shows an example Overview page of Cost Center.

No.

Description

1

The new navigation provides clear direction on where to go to find cost insights, cost organization, budget management, and cost optimization.

2

The layout of Cost Management Overview has been optimized to give you a convenient view of your costs, including month-to-date costs, forecasted month-end costs, actual budget overruns/forecasted budget overruns, cost anomalies from the last 30 days, and estimated monthly savings.

3

You can now view your current month costs in multiple dimensions, for example, by service type, enterprise project, cost tag, cost category, linked account, and region.

4

You can view costs for the current month and the last month as well as forecasted costs.

5

This area displays the top 5 costs by MoM growth ($). The data can be displayed by service type, enterprise project, cost tag, cost category, or linked account.

6

Displays the latest information about function release in Cost Center.

7

Cost Assistant offers maturity scores and insight recommendations to help you manage costs better.

8

Your cost allocation is analyzed by enterprise project, cost tag, and cost category, and rates the cost management maturity based on the optimal allocation method.

Functions

The following table describes the tools offered by Cost Center.

Category

Tool

Description

Function

Cost planning

Cost and usage forecasting

Forecasts your future costs and usage based on your historical costs and usage on Huawei Cloud.

Forecasting

Budgets

Allows you to configure budgets and stay informed of how your costs and usage progress.

Creating a Budget

Budget reports

Tracks your budgeting on a regular basis if you create budget reports on the Reports > Budget Reports page.

Budget Reports

Cost management and control

Budget alerts

Sends you an alert by email or SMS when your actual cost or usage reaches the configured alert threshold.

Creating a Budget

Cost anomaly detection

Monitors the costs of your pay-per-use resources to detect cost anomalies and reduce unnecessary expenditures.

Cost Anomaly Detection

Enterprises' costs and reports

Cost analysis

Presents your cost data visually, in graphs and tables. You can view your cloud costs and usage of different billing cycles and dive deeper by service type, region, linked account, billing mode, and cost tag.

Viewing Cost Analyses

Analysis reports

Allows you to save the cost analyses as reports so that you can share with the various member accounts under your master account. On the Reports > Analysis Reports page, you can use some commonly used analysis reports preconfigured in Cost Center.

Analysis Reports

Cost details

Allows you to export the details of monthly amortized costs.

Exporting Cost Details

Cost tags

Identifies your cloud resources. You can use the cost tags to manage your resources and activate them to track your costs. Cost tags can be used for cost analysis and budget management.

Overview and Activating Cost Tags

Cost Categories

Groups your costs based on the rules you configure, such as linked account, service type, bill type, cost tag, and enterprise project, or even the custom rules configured for other cost categories.

Overview

Cost optimization

Pay-per-use to yearly/monthly

Analyzes the usage of your pay-per-use ECS, EVS, RDS, ELB, and SFS Turbo resources. Cost Center provides optimization options based on these analyses, identifying places where you can save money by changing the billing mode from pay-per-use to yearly/monthly.

Yearly/Monthly Subscriptions

Savings plans

Provides you with custom savings plan recommendations based on your historical pay-per-use expenditures to help you save money.

Purchasing Savings Plans

Reserved instances

Allows you to view your RI utilization, RI coverage, net savings, and potential savings.

Reserved Instances