Allocations

The Allocations page allows you to aggregate cost by namespace, deployment, service, and other native Kubernetes concepts. While selecting Single Aggregation, you will only be able to categorize by one concept at a time. While selecting Multi Aggregation, you will be able to filter for multiple concepts at the same time.

Allocations

Service in this context refers to a Kubernetes object that exposes an interface to outside consumers, not a cloud service.

Costs aggregations are also visible by other meaningful organizational concepts, e.g. Team, Department, and Product. These aggregations are based on Kubernetes labels, referenced at both the pod and namespace-level, with labels at the pod-level being favored over the namespace label when both are present. Workloads without the relevant label will be shown as __unallocated__.

UI Overview

Date range

You can control the window of allocation spend by selecting Last 7 days (the default option), and choosing the time window you want to view spend for. When using custom dates instead of a preset, select Apply to make changes.

Aggregate By

Here you can aggregate cost by namespace, deployment, service, and other native Kubernetes concepts. While selecting Single Aggregation, you will only be able to categorize by one concept at a time. While selecting Multi Aggregation, you will be able to filter for multiple concepts at the same time.

Costs aggregations are also visible by other meaningful organizational concepts, e.g. Team, Department, and Product. These aggregations are based on Kubernetes labels, referenced at both the pod and namespace-level, with labels at the pod-level being favored over the namespace label when both are present. Workloads without the relevant label will be shown as __unallocated__.

Edit Report

Selecting Edit Report will provide more options of filtering and visualizing your window query.

Idle costs

For an overview of what idle costs are and how they are calculated, see the bottom of the page.

Customize how you wish idle costs to be displayed in your report chart:

• Hide: Hides idle costs.

• Separate By Cluster: Associates idle costs with the clusters they are a part of.

• Separate By Node: Associates idle costs with the nodes they are scheduled to.

Chart

View Allocations data in the following formats:

1. Cost over time: Cost per aggregation broken down over days or hours depending on date range

2. Cost: Total cost per aggregation over date range

3. Proportional cost: Cost per aggregate displayed as a percentage of total cost over date range

4. Cost Treemap: Hierarchically structured view of costs in current aggregation

While Cost over time is selected, hover over any interval to receive a breakdown of your spending.

Cost metric

View either cumulative or run rate costs measured over the selected time window based on the resources allocated.

• 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

Costs allocations are based on the following:

1. Resources allocated, i.e. max of resource requests and usage

2. The cost of each resource

3. The amount of time resources were provisioned

For more information, refer to the OpenCost spec.

Filters

Filter resources by namespace, cluster, and/or Kubernetes label to more closely investigate a rise in spend or key cost drivers at different aggregations such as deployments or pods. When a filter is applied, only resources with this matching value will be shown. These filters are also applied to external out-of-cluster asset tags:

Cluster	Limit results to workloads in a set of clusters with matching IDs. Note: clusterID is passed in values at install-time.
Node	Limit results to workloads where the node name is filtered for.
Namespace	Limit results to workloads in a set of Kubernetes namespaces.
Label	Limit results to workloads with matching Kubernetes labels. Namespace labels are applied to all of its workloads. Supports filtering by __unallocated__ as well.
Service	Limit results to workloads based on Kubernetes service name.
Controller	Limit results to workloads based on Kubernetes controller name.
Controllerkind	Limit results to workloads based on Kubernetes controller (Daemonset, Deployment, Job, Statefulset, Replicaset, etc) type.
Pod	Limit results to workloads where the Kubernetes pod name is filtered for.

Comma-separated lists are supported to filter by multiple categories, e.g. namespace filter equals kube-system,kubecost. Wild card filters are also supported, indicated by a * following the filter, e.g. namespace=kube* to return any namespace beginning with kube.

Additional options

The three horizontal dots icon provides additional means of handling your query data. You can open a saved report or download your query data as a CSV file.

Idle

Cluster idle cost is defined as the difference between the cost of allocated resources and the cost of the hardware they run on. Allocation is defined as the max of usage and requests. It can also be expressed as follows:

idle_cost = sum(cluster_cost) - (cpu_allocation_cost + ram_allocation_cost + gpu_allocation_cost) where allocation = max(request, usage)

Idle costs can also be thought of as the cost of the space that the Kubernetes scheduler could schedule pods, without disrupting any existing workloads, but it is not currently.