Preface

Configure cost models so cost management accurately mirrors the specific pricing and discount structures of your cloud providers.

It can be difficult to determine the real cost of cloud-based IT systems. Different integrations provide a variety of cost data and metrics, which make it complicated to calculate and accurately distribute costs. A cost model is a framework that cost management uses to determine the calculations to apply to costs. With a cost model, you can associate a price to metrics provided by your integrations and charge for utilization of resources.

In some cases, costs are related to the raw costs of the infrastructure, while in other cases there is a price list that maps usage to costs. Your data must be normalized before you can add a markup to cover your overhead and distribute the charges to your resources or end customers. With a cost model, you can better align costs to utilization: customers that use a resource more will be charged more.

A cost model can have multiple different integrations assigned to it, but a single integration can be mapped to only one cost model.