Chapter 3. Configuring tags and labels in cost management

To identify your OpenShift resources running on AWS or Azure instances, cost management matches tags between integrations in the following order:

OpenShift labels follow an inheritance pattern from cluster to node, and from project to pod. You can associate costs at the node or project level without labeling every pod in your cluster.

Key-value pairs from node and project labels are inherited at the pod level for pod metrics in cost management. Key-value pairs from the cluster and node labels are inherited at the project level by the persistent volume claims (PVC) at each level. You can group by cluster, node, or project labels to see relevant PVCs in those workloads.

If a key already exists in the pod, then the value for that key in the pod remains. Cost management does not overwrite the pod value with the project or node value. A similar process happens from node to project.

Consider the following examples.

Example 1: Your organization assigns the label app and the value costpod1 to a pod. The project for this pod has the label app and the value cost-project. These resources are running on a node with the label us-east-1. The label app and the value costpod1 remain associated with the pod.

Example 2: Your organization has a project with the label app and the value cost-project. The project has three pods running and they are not labeled. Cost management associates the label app and the value cost-project with these pods.

The integrations apply these identifiers automatically. This form of tagging provides a direct link between Microsoft Azure or AWS instances and OpenShift nodes.

AWS assigns every EC2 instance a resource identifier (a number such as i-01f44b3d90ef90055). OpenShift nodes are matched directly to the AWS EC2 instance the cluster is running on using the AWS resource identifier. The OpenShift reports in cost management (generated from Prometheus data) include this identifier for nodes. Similarly in Microsoft Azure, each virtual machine instance ID is included in the OpenShift reports for cost management.

You can use the following special-case tags to associate cloud cost with OpenShift:

These tags have matching priority over custom tags, and are especially useful to differentiate the costs of different OpenShift clusters running on the same instance.

To use this tagging method to identify an OpenShift cluster, tag your instance with the key openshift_cluster and enter the OpenShift integration name as the value. In the following example, the name of the OpenShift integration in cost management is dev-cluster:

You can use any key:value combination as tags, and cost management will associate identical tag key and values together. You can then group costs by tag key, account, service, region, and more to view your costs and charge for that tag.

Amazon creates certain identifiers automatically, such as the EC2 instance resource identifier, or a number such as i-123456789, which cost management uses similarly.

You can also add your own tags at the individual resource level. These tags must be activated for Cost and Usage Reporting to export them to the cost management application.

Configure AWS tags for cost management using the following steps:

To create identifiers for virtual machine instances automatically, add a Microsoft Azure integration, which cost management uses similarly to tags to associate Microsoft Azure resources to related OpenShift resources. Add your own tags in Microsoft Azure at the individual resource level.

Create and apply Microsoft Azure tags for cost management using the instructions in the Microsoft Azure documentation: Use tags to organize your Azure resources and management hierarchy.

You can apply custom labels to Google Cloud resources, such as virtual machine instances, images, and persistent disks. These labels are automatically added to your BigQuery export and sent to cost management.

The AWS or Microsoft Azure tag equivalent in OpenShift is a label, which also consists of a key:value pair. The cost management service collects OpenShift tag data from nodes, pods, and persistent volumes (or persistent volume claims) using Prometheus metrics and Cost Management Metrics Operator.

All cloud provider tags are activated in cost management by default. Sometimes having too many resource tags can affect cost management performance. Enabled tags are limited to 200 per account. Unnecessary tags can also make managing your costs more complicated when grouping tags and matching key:value pairs. Disable tags you are not actively using to reduce these potential issues.

You can enable or disable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cost categories in the cost management service. AWS cost categories allow your organization to group meaningful cost and usage information in addition to tags. In order to use cost categories in cost management, they must first be configured in the AWS Console. The following procedure describes how to enable cost categories in the cost management service.