Updated on 2024-01-29 GMT+08:00

Cost Management

As you migrate more of your services to the cloud, managing cloud costs becomes more important. For example, you may be more concerned with cost management when using DDoS Mitigation. The following describes how to manage costs in terms of cost composition, allocation, analysis, and optimization. Optimizing costs can help you maximize return on investment.

Cost Composition

When you use the DDoS Mitigation service on Huawei Cloud, the costs are mainly resource costs, which depend on the billing items. For details, see Billing Items.

Figure 1 Resource costs

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.

  • By cost tag

    You use tags to sort your Huawei Cloud resources in a variety of different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. The following is the process of managing costs by predefined tags (recommended).

    Figure 2 Adding a tag to an ECS

    For details, see Viewing Costs by Cost Tag.

  • By cost category

    You can use Cost Categories provided by 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 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. If the budget thresholds you defined are reached, Cost Center will send alerts to the recipients you configured. 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 quarterly cost budget for DDoS Mitigation. The quarterly budget is 5,000 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 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

    Cost Center can help monitor the historical expenditures and resource usage of the DDoS Mitigation service, identify idle resources, and provide optimization suggestions so that you can reduce costs as much as possible. 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.