Cloud Cost Explorer

The Cloud Cost Explorer is a dashboard which provides visualization and filtering of your cloud spending. This dashboard includes the costs for all assets in your connected cloud accounts by pulling from those providers' Cost and Usage Reports (CURs) or other cloud billing reports.

Cloud Cost Explorer

For help on integrating one or several cloud service providers (CSPs), see the corresponding documentation:

• Kubecost Cloud AWS Integration

• Kubecost Cloud GCP Integration

• Kubecost Cloud Azure Integration

UI Overview

Date range

You can adjust your displayed metrics using the date range feature, represented by Last 7 days, the default range. This will control the time range of metrics that appear. Select the date range of the report by setting specific start and end dates, or by using one of the preset options.

Aggregate filters

You can adjust your displayed metrics by aggregating your cost by category. Supported fields are Account, Provider, Invoice Entity, Service, Item, as well as custom labels. The Cloud Cost Explorer dashboard supports single and multi-aggregation. See the table below for descriptions of each field.

Aggregation	Description
Account	The ID of the billing account your cloud provider bill comes from. (ex: AWS Management/Payer Account ID, GCP Billing Account ID, Azure Billing Account ID)
Provider	Cloud service provider (ex: AWS, Azure, GCP)
Invoice Entity	Cloud provider account (ex: AWS Account, Azure Subscription, GCP Project)
Service	Cloud provider services (ex: S3, microsoft.compute, BigQuery)
Item	Individual items from your cloud billing report(s)
Labels	Labels/tags on your cloud resources (ex: AWS tags, Azure tags, GCP labels)

Edit

Selecting the Edit button will allow for additional filtering and pricing display options for your cloud data.

Add filters

You can filter displayed dashboard metrics by selecting Edit, then adding a filter. Filters can be created for the following categories (see descriptions of each category in the Aggregate filters table above):

• Service

• Account

• Invoice Entity

• Provider

• Labels

Cost Metric

The Cost Metric dropdown allows you to adjust the displayed cost data based on different calculations. Cost Metric values are based on and calculated following standard FinOps dimensions and metrics, but may be calculated differently depending on your CSP. Learn more about how these metrics are calculated by each CSP in the Cost metrics by CSP section below. The five available metrics supported by the Cloud Costs Explorer are:

Cost Metric	Description
Amortized Net Cost	Net Cost with removed cash upfront fees and amortized (default)
Net Cost	Costs inclusive of discounts and credits. Will also include one-time and recurring charges.
List Cost	CSP pricing without any discounts
Invoiced Cost	Pricing based on usage during billing period
Amortized Cost	Effective/upfront cost across the billing period

Additional options

Selecting Save will save your current Cloud Costs query for access on the Reports page.

Select the three horizontal dots icon to view additional options. Select Open Report to open any existing Cloud Costs reports. Selecting Download CSV will download the current query as a CSV file.

Cost metrics by CSP

The current Cloud Cost schema is optimistic in that it provides space for cost metrics that may not yet be available from some providers. As the FOCUS Spec gains more adoption among CSPs, all fields will be populated with values that match the definitions. For now, some values on certain providers are being populated with their nearest approximate. This section outlines how each value is populated on each CSP.

AWS cost metrics

Of all billing exports and APIs, the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) has the most robust set of cost metrics, and currently has the best support. Depending on what kind of discounts or resources a user has, the schema changes, therefore many of these columns are populated dynamically to support all users. In particular, any _net_ column will only be available if the user has a discount that causes it to exist. Additionally, Kubecost currently only considers line items that have a line_item_line_item_type of Usage, DiscountUsage, SavingsPlanCoveredUsage, EdpDiscount, or PrivateRateDiscount.

More information on the columns and their definitions can be found in AWS' Line item details documentation.

List Cost

To populate list price, Kubecost uses pricing_public_on_demand_cost.

Net Cost

Kubecost uses line_item_net_unblended_cost if available. If not, Kubecost uses line_item_unblended_cost.

Amortized Net Cost

If _net_ is not available, Kubecost uses Amortized Cost

If line_item_line_item_type is DiscountUsage, Kubecost uses reservation_net_effective_cost.

If line_item_line_item_type is SavingsPlanCoveredUsage, Kubecost uses savings_plan_net_savings_plan_effective_cost.

Default to line_item_net_unblended_cost.

Invoiced Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Amortized Cost

If line_item_line_item_type is DiscountUsage, Kubecost uses reservation_effective_cost.

If line_item_line_item_type is SavingsPlanCoveredUsage, Kubecost uses savings_plan_savings_plan_effective_cost.

Default to line_item_unblended_cost.

GCP cost metrics

Cloud Cost uses a detailed billing export accessed via BigQuery to interface with GCP. This export provides Kubecost with a Cost column with a float value in addition to an array of credit objects per item. These credits are various discounts applied to the item being referenced.

More details about the export can be found in GCP's Structure of Detailed data export.

List Cost

The Cost column for the line item.

Net Cost

The Cost column plus the sum of all credit amounts.

Amortized Net Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Invoiced Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Amortized Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Azure cost metrics

The Azure billing export can be set to amortized or not amortized during creation. Depending on this, either the Net Cost Metric or Amortized Net Cost metric will be accurate. Additionally the Azure export has multiple schema depending on when it was created and what kind of account the user has. There are also localized versions of the headers.

List Cost

Kubecost usespaygcostinbillingcurrency if available, otherwise Kubecost uses Net Cost

Net Cost

Kubecost uses costinbillingcurrency. If not available, Kubecost uses pretaxcost, and if that isn't available, Kubecost uses cost.

Amortized Net Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Invoiced Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.

Amortized Cost

Kubecost uses Net Cost.