Assets Dashboard
The Kubecost Assets dashboard shows Kubernetes cluster costs broken down by the individual backing assets in your cluster (e.g. cost by node, disk, and other assets). It’s used to identify spend drivers over time and to audit Allocation data. This view can also optionally show out-of-cluster assets by service, tag/label, etc.
Similar to our Allocation API, the Assets API uses our ETL pipeline which aggregates data daily. This allows for enterprise-scale with much higher performance.
Configuring your query
Kubecost provides a variety of options for configuring your assets queries to view the information you need. Below is a table of the major configuration options, with in-depth explanations in this article for how they work.
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
Date Range (Last 7 days) | Will report Last 7 days by default. Manually select your start and end date, or pick one of twelve preset options |
Aggregate By | Aggregate costs by one or several concepts. Add custom labels |
Save/Unsave | Save or unsave the current report |
Edit | Adjust cost metrics and how data is displayed |
Additional options icon | Additional options for opening and downloading reports |
Date Range
Select the date range of the report by setting specific start and end dates, or using one of the preset options.
Aggregate By
Here you can aggregate cost by native Kubernetes concepts. While selecting Single Aggregation, you will only be able to select one concept at a time. While selecting Multi Aggregation, you will be able to filter for multiple concepts at the same time. Assets will be by default aggregated by Type.
Filters
Filter assets by all available aggregation categories. When a filter is applied, only resources with this matching value will be shown. Supports advanced filtering options as well.
Edit
The Edit icon has additional options to filter your search:
Step size
Change the display of assets window. Daily provides a day-by-day breakdown of assets. Entire window creates a semicircle that shows each asset as a sizable portion based on total cost within the displayed time frame.
Cost metric
View either cumulative or run rate costs measured over the selected time window based on the assets being filtered for.
Cumulative Cost: represents the actual/historical spend captured by the Kubecost agent over the selected time window
Rate metrics: Monthly, daily, or hourly “run rate” cost, also used for projected cost figures, based on samples in the selected time window
Chart
View Assets data in the following formats:
Cost over time: Cost per aggregation broken down over days or hours depending on date range
Cost forecast: Cost over time with additional projected spend
Additional options
The three horizontal dots icon will provide additional options for handling your reports:
Open Report: Open one of your saved reports
Download CSV: Download your current report as a CSV file
Assets metrics table
The assets metrics table displays your aggregate assets, with four columns to organize by.
Name: Name of the aggregate group
Credits: Amount deducted from total cost due to provider-applied credit. A negative number means the total cost was reduced.
Adjusted: Amount added to total cost based on reconciliation with cloud provider’s billing data.
Total cost: Shows the total cost of the aggregate asset factoring in additions or subtractions from the Credits and Adjusted columns.
Hovering over the gray info icon next to each asset will provide you with the hours run and hourly cost of the asset. To the left of each asset name is one of several Category icons (you can aggregate by these): Storage, Network, Compute, Management, and Other.
Gray bubble text may appear next to an asset. These are all manually-assigned labels to an asset. To filter assets for a particular label, select the Edit search parameters icon, then select Label/Tag from the Filters dropdown and enter the complete name of the label.
You can select an aggregate asset to view all individual assets comprising it. Each individual asset should have a ProviderID.
Cloud cost reconciliation
After granting Kubecost permission to access cloud billing data, Kubecost adjusts its asset prices once cloud billing data becomes available, e.g. AWS Cost and Usage Report and the spot data feed. Until this data is available from cloud providers, Kubecost uses data from public cloud APIs to determine cost, or alternatively custom pricing sheets. This allows teams to have highly accurate estimates of asset prices in real-time and then become even more precise once cloud billing data becomes available, which is often 1-2 hours for spot nodes and up to a day for reserved instances/savings plans.
While cloud adjustments typically lag by roughly a day, there are certain adjustments, e.g. credits, that may continue to come in over the course of the month, and in some cases at the very end of the month, so reconciliation adjustments may continue to update over time.
Node costs breakdown
The Assets page allows you to view a dedicated breakdown of node costs. To do so, you must first filter for AssetType=Node, which will unnaggregate the page and display all nodes with associated costs. Selecting an indivudal line item will open a window containing cost metrics including hours running, hourly cost rate, overhead cost, and total cost. You can even view these costs broken down by CPU, GPU, and RAM:
Overhead costs refer to the capacity costs minus allocatable costs. This includes Kubelet, container runtime, and node operating systems and software. It does not include Prometheus, DNS, cert-manager, kube-system, or pods running with Kubernetes. To learn more about overhead costs, watch Node Size Matters, a presentation by Kubecost engineers from KubeCon 2023.
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