Visualizing your costs using cost explorer
Use Cost Explorer to visualize and understand your costs
Abstract
Chapter 1. Using Cost Explorer
The cost management Cost Explorer enables you to see your costs through time. With Cost Explorer, you can filter through your expenditure to find answers to your questions, view more details, and look for trends in data.
1.1. Understanding Cost Explorer
The cost management Cost Explorer enables you to see your costs through time. With Cost Explorer, you can filter through your expenditure to find answers to your questions, view more details, and look for trends in data.
With Cost Explorer you can:
- Identify abnormal events.
- Understand how your cost data changes over time.
- Create custom bar charts of your cost and usage data.
- Export custom cost data files.
Figure 1.1. The Cost Explorer Interface
A single bar in the Cost Explorer chart represents one day of cost and usage data corresponding to the filtered options. The five most significant metrics are individually displayed and all other metrics placed into the Others category. See Section 1.2, “Filtering cost data with Cost Explorer” for more information about filtering your cost and usage data.
1.1.1. Cost of unallocated resources in an OpenShift cluster
Unallocated costs are visible when viewing OpenShift cost data grouped by project. Rows named Platform unallocated and Worker unallocated are available when viewing OpenShift cost data by project.
- Platform unallocated costs
- The costs for parts of primary and infrastructure nodes that are not allocated to run workloads. In this case, those workloads are the OpenShift platform or control plane.
- Worker unallocated costs
- The costs that represent any unused part of your worker node’s usage and request capacity.
- Network unattributed costs
- Costs associated with ingress and egress network traffic for individual nodes.
1.1.2. Unattributed Storage project for OpenShift on Cloud
Azure and AWS are the only cloud service providers that create an Unattributed Storage project, but in the future, more providers might.
Unattributed Storage is a type of project that gets created when cost management is unable to correlate a portion of the cloud cost to an OpenShift namespace.
There are two scenarios where Unattributed Storage can happen:
Volumes without a claim
- A persistent volume (PV) exists, but there are no persistent volume claims (PVCs) that use the volume. Without a claim, the cloud cost cannot be associated with a node or namespace.
Unutilized disk space
- In some situations, cost management creates its own project because it cannot determine which project should be charged with the money from the cloud integration.
Consider the following example:
- You have a disk that has 30 GiBs.
- Project A creates a persistent volume that has a capacity of 20 GiBs.
- The cloud integration charges $60 for that disk.
Cost management uses the following equation to calculate how much to charge Project A based on disk capacity. In this example, the cost is $40:
(PV’s Capacity) / Disk Capacity * Cost of Disk
20/30 * 60 = $40
The cloud integration still bills you for the $60 dollars, but {product-title} can only attribute $20 to Project A based off how much they requested. The remaining $40 is assigned to the *Unattributed Storage* project. {product-title-up} calculates the remaining portion of that disk with the following equation. In this example, the cost is $20:
((Disk Capacity - Sum(PV capacity) / Disk Capacity) * Cost of Disk
(30 - 20) / 30 * 60 = $20
1.2. Filtering cost data with Cost Explorer
To customize the cost data that appears, select items by using the filter options in the Cost Explorer. To change how your cloud and OpenShift costs display, select items in the Perspective menu. To display those costs at different levels of your OpenShift instance, select items in the Project menu. To see how costs are distributed based on CPU or memory metrics in project cost breakdowns, select Overhead cost.
Prerequisites
- You must have your OpenShift cluster OpenShift cluster added as a cost management data integration. For instructions see Integrating OpenShift Container Platform data into cost management.
- You must have your cloud infrastructure account added as a cost management data integration. For instructions for your cloud provider type see Adding integrations to cost management.
Procedure
- To view cumulative costs from OpenShift or a cloud provider, go to the Cost Explorer and select an item from the Perspective menu. For example, to view your cumulative OpenShift Container Platform costs, select All OpenShift Cost.
- To further refine your costs at different levels in your OpenShift instance, select a grouping. Depending on your cloud provider you can group by Projects, Nodes, Clusters, or Tags.
- To search for a particular node, cluster or tag, you can filter by searching for one or more Projects, Nodes, Clusters, or Tags.
- To refine the time period in your search, click to select a different time period from the menu. For example, select Last 90 days to view the cost data from the last 90 days.
Next Steps
After filtering your data, you can export it into a CSV file. See Section 1.3, “Exporting cost data” for more information.
1.2.1. Tracking the cost of ROSA
You can track expenses associated with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with Cost Explorer. To find costs associated with ROSA, filter the costs in Cost Explorer and view them grouped by services.
On Cost Explorer or AWS details page, view ROSA costs on the Amazon Web Service Filtered by OpenShift view by grouping by service and looking for virtual machine licenses.
Procedure
- In cost management, go to the Cost Explorer page.
- On the Cost Explorer page, in the Perspective menu, select Amazon Web Services filtered by OpenShift.
- In the Group by field, select Service.
- In the results, find the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.
Next Steps
After you filter your data, you can export it into a CSV file. See Section 1.3, “Exporting cost data” for more information.
1.2.2. Tracking the cost of ARO in OpenShift
You can track expenses associated with Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) when you calculate the cost of OpenShift for Microsoft Azure. To find costs associated with ARO, filter the costs in Cost Explorer and view them grouped by services.
The overall service cost includes all virtual machine license fees on the underlying nodes. For example, if the node is also running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the specific cost of running ARO is included.
Procedure
- In cost management, go to the Cost Explorer page.
- On the Cost Explorer page, in the Perspective menu, select Microsoft Azure filtered by OpenShift.
- In the Group by field, select Service.
- In the results, search for the virtual machine licences. The service cost includes all of the virtual machine licences fees on each node.
Next Steps
After you filter your data, you can export it into a CSV file. See Section 1.3, “Exporting cost data” for more information.
1.3. Exporting cost data
Use the Cost Explorer to export customized CSV files of cost data to your local workstation. These files contain more details about your cost data that you can apply in your desired reporting tool.
Prerequisites
- Your OpenShift cluster added as a cost management data integration. See Integrating OpenShift Container Platform data into cost management for instructions.
- Your cloud infrastructure account added as a cost management data integration. See Adding integrations to cost management for instructions for your cloud provider type.
Procedure
- Navigate to the Cost Explorer application.
- Use the Cost Explorer filter options to create the desired information.
- Select items to be exported in the list populated below the Cost Explorer graph.
-
Click the
Export button.
Click .
The CSV file will download to your local system.
Providing feedback on Red Hat documentation
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Prerequisites
- You are logged in to the Red Hat Customer Portal.
Procedure
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- Click the following link: Create Issue.
- Describe the issue or enhancement in the Summary text box.
- Provide details about the issue or requested enhancement in the Description text box.
- Type your name in the Reporter text box.
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