Cost Dashboard

The Cost Dashboard allows you to see the cost of all services across all cloud accounts for your organization, providing you with the cost information you need to make informed cloud cost decisions. Cost views include:

  • Daily cost
  • Month-to-date costs
  • Most expensive clouds in the past 30 days
  • Most expensive VMs/Instance Types/Service Types/Regions in the past 30 days
  • Recommendations and Savings

You can filter and sort costs and explore more details in individual systems. You can also export cost tables in XLS format.

To see the Cost Dashboard, you must have the correct permissions. Billing retrieval must be turned on to see public cloud data. These settings are controlled by your system administrator.

Because it takes time for public cloud providers to finalize their billing, the most recent costing information for public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and Google will be the costs from the day before yesterday. For AWS, costs are retrieved daily throughout the month and the retrieval continues until the end of the next month in order to incorporate any late billing adjustments. For private clouds, you'll be able to see yesterday's costs. Costs may spike on the first day of the month because of business support costs, tax, or other monthly charges.

If you're signed in to a parent organization, you'll be able to see costs for all services owned by the child organizations.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Select the display currency

You can select your preferred currency for all of your cost data. This includes Cost Dashboard data and service detail costs.

To set the currency:

  1. Click the dropdown menu at the top right of the Service Portal window.
  2. Select Preferences.
  3. Select the currency you want to use.
  4. Click Save.

Filter Cost Dashboard data

To focus on specific account costs within your organization, you can filter the costing information that appears on the Cost Dashboard page by Cloud Type, Service Type, Billing Tags, or Ownership.

To see which filters have been applied to the Cost Dashboard page, hover over Details under the Filter button. By default, no filters are applied.

To filter Cost Dashboard data:

  1. Click Filter at the top of the Cost Dashboard page to open the Filters dialog.
  2. From Cloud Type, select one of the following:
    • All Cloud Types
    • Private
    • Public

    Your Cloud Type selection affects the cloud account that will be represented in the tables and charts

  3. You can specify which Service Type you want to filter for or leave the setting at All Services.

    The Service Type filter only applies to the Daily Cost, Monthly Cost, and Most Expensive Regions.

  4. If you want to further refine your view of the costs, you can set Advanced Filters to filter by Billing Tags or Ownership.

    The qualifiers for the Advanced Filters are: "contains", "doesn't contain", "equals", or "doesn't equal". For the qualifiers “contains” and “doesn’t contain”, add wildcard characters to your descriptive text string. Use “?” to replace a single character and “*” for one or more characters. For the qualifiers “equals” and “doesn’t equal”, the descriptive text string doesn't support wildcard characters.

  5. Click Add Filter to set up additional Advanced Filters.
  6. Click Apply Filters to apply and save your filter selection.

When you sign out and then sign into the Service Portal, the filters you have set will be retained.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Daily Cost chart and tables

When unfiltered, the default Daily Cost chart shows a summary of the total costs for your organization for the previous 60 days, so you can easily see any spikes in your costs and investigate the cause of extra expenses. Each bar on this chart represents one day and can be selected to view your daily cost breakdown. The most recent cost shown on this chart for public clouds is for the day before yesterday. The "yesterday" bar has a zero value. For private clouds, the most recent cost shown is for yesterday. The horizontal dotted orange line indicates the average cost of all the days that are visible at the current zoom level.

Click the legend of this chart to show/hide weekdays or weekends. Click to export the Daily Cost data in XLS format.

Use zooming and scrolling to see cost trends on bigger or smaller scales. Using and , you can zoom to:

  • one week
  • one month
  • two months (default)
  • three months
  • six months
  • one year
  • two years

As you're zooming out, when you reach three months, the bars in the chart change to a line to allow you to more easily visualize trends over time.

Scrolling lets you scan through your data to get a better picture of your costs over time. Use the arrows at the sides of the chart to view consecutive timespans or see older costs. Scrolling stops at the date of the most recent available data.

The cost scale on the y-axis changes to accommodate bar or line height as you zoom and scroll.

Filter the Daily Cost chart and tables to show a subset of the costs by changing the general Cost Dashboard filter. To understand more details of your daily costs:

  • To view basic cost details for each day on the chart, hover over a bar.
  • To view even more details, click an individual bar. This will bring up the Daily Cost Breakdown table, which shows the costs for that day, broken down by Service Type.
  • To see all the costs for that day under the Service Type you selected, click an individual Service Type to bring up the Daily Cost Details table. This table and the Daily Cost Breakdown table show you the most expensive costs first and are sortable by any column on the table headers.
  • To help you understand a spike or dip in costs, sort the Cost Delta columns to show the largest cost increases and decreases.

Click to download the Daily Cost table in XLS format.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

You can detect spending anomalies automatically to help you keep costs under control. For more information, see Cost Anomaly Detection.

Month-to-Date Cost chart and table

Click the Table icon to see the table view and the Chart icon to see the chart view. Click to download the chart in XLS format.

When unfiltered, the Month-to-date Cost chart shows:

  • Cumulative costs of the previous month for your organization (gray solid line).
  • Costs from the beginning of the current month until yesterday for private clouds and until the day before yesterday for public clouds (blue solid line).
  • Predicted costs for the remainder of the current month (dotted line).

In the Month-to-date Cost chart, you can:

  • Hover over lines in the chart to see basic cost details for each day.
  • Click the lines of the chart to view the Daily Cost for each day and a breakdown of individual daily costs. To go back to Month-to-date Costs, click the Summary tab.
  • Click the chart legend to show or hide the corresponding line in the chart.

  • The orange line represents the budget amount that you specify. For more information, see Display a monthly budget amount.

When unfiltered, the Month-to-date Cost table shows costs for either the current month or the previous month for Service Types, Charge Types, or Categories. Cost categories include custom attribute costs for private cloud VMs.

Filter the Month-to-date Cost chart and table to show a subset of the costs by changing the general Cost Dashboard filter. This is useful for predicting the costs for a single service type. For more information, see Filter Cost Dashboard data.

While you can filter data in the Month-to-date chart and table of the Service Portal Cost Dashboard, you can't use a filter in the Month-to-date chart and table of the Service Portal main Dashboard.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Display a monthly budget amount

In the Month-to-date Cost chart, click to open the Configure Budget dialog, where you can define a monthly budget in your preferred currency. This budget amount applies to your expenses and the expenses of any organizations you're a member of or manage. The budget amount you set will appear as an orange line on the Month-to-date Cost chart.

In the Configure Budget dialog, you can also set up alerts to advise you when:

  • Your expenses are projected to exceed your monthly budget.
  • Your expenses exceed a budget threshold that you set up.

The alerts will show up in the Alerts tab of the Service Portal Cost Dashboard page in your preferred currency. For more information about the Alerts tab, see Cost Anomaly Detection. You can also configure Commander to send alerts by email. If you enable the alerts, and both conditions are triggered at the same time, priority is given to the threshold alert, so you won't see more than one alert at a time. Once you've received alerts for both of these conditions, you won't receive any other budget alerts for the month unless you change any settings on the Configure Budget dialog. If you change your spending, you won't get another alert, but if your spending level goes under the budget line, then goes back over, another alert will be triggered.

You can also open the Configure Budget dialog from the Alerts tab.

If you belong to more than one organization, only the organizations that have projected expenses over the budget or expenses that exceed the threshold will be included in the alerts.

To receive notification emails, you'll need to have a valid email address set up. If you see a message in the Configure Budget dialog that your account doesn't have a valid email address, contact your administrator.

Most Expensive Clouds table and chart

When unfiltered, the Most expensive clouds table and chart show the cost of your organization's VMs and other services aggregated over the past 30 days under specific cloud accounts, in order of cost. Each table row or pie chart slice represents a separate cloud account, not a summary of a cloud account type. For example, if you have more than one AWS account, you'll see separate entries for each AWS account you have.

Click to open the Configure Chart dialog where you can select the number of cloud accounts you want to display and select the table or pie chart format for viewing the costs.

The pie chart represents 100% of your cloud accounts. If you choose to display fewer cloud accounts than you have, the cloud accounts that are the least expensive will be grouped under the title “Others”. For example, if you have 7 cloud accounts altogether and you configure the pie chart to display the top 5 cloud accounts, the resulting chart will show 6 slices. The slice that's labeled “Others” will represent the sum of the 2 remaining cloud accounts.

Filter the Most expensive clouds table and chart to show a subset of the costs by changing the general Cost Dashboard filter.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Most Expensive VMs table

When unfiltered, the Most Expensive VMs table shows your organization's most expensive VMs, service types, instance types or regions over the past 30 days.

Click to open the Configure Chart dialog, which allows you to select the number and type of items you want to display. The settings display:

  • VMs — The most expensive VMs in the past 30 days.
  • Instance Types — The instance types of your VMs that have been the most costly in the past 30 days.
  • Service Types — The most expensive services in the past 30 days, which include, but aren't limited to, VMs.
  • Regions — Regions that have accumulated the most costs through service usage in the past 30 days.

If you select VMs in the Most Expensive VMs table, the Downsizing arrow and Upsizing arrow arrows beside a VM indicate that there’s a downsizing or upsizing recommendation for that VM. To limit the VMs displayed to only those that have downsizing recommendations, select VMs in the Configure Chart dialog and enable Only show VMs with downsizing recommendations.

If you want to show a subset of the costs, you can filter the Most Expensive VMs table by changing the general Cost Dashboard filter.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Recommendations and Savings table and chart

When unfiltered, the Recommendations and Savings table and chart show recommendations for your organization to help you optimize VM performance and minimize costs. Click any item in the table or chart to see details of the item on the Recommendations page, where you can view and apply rightsizing as well as power scheduling recommendations specific to your VM. Any filters you apply in the Cost Dashboard page will be transferred to the Recommendations page. For more information on recommendations, see Rightsize VMs and Instances.

You must have the correct permissions to see the Recommendations page.

For Recommendations and Savings, click to see the table and to see the chart. If you want to show a subset of the costs, you can filter the Recommendations and Savings table and chart by changing the general Cost Dashboard filter. Any filters you apply to the Cost Dashboard page will also be in effect for the Recommendations page. Hover over the filter field window at the top of the Recommendations page to see these filters. To clear these filters in the Recommendations page, click the "x" in the filter field. The filters are retained until you sign out or clear the filter.

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, refer to Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard.

Troubleshooting the Cost Dashboard

If you don’t see the costs you expect to see, use these suggestions to troubleshoot your Cost Dashboard setup:

  • If you can't see the Cost Dashboard or the Recommendations page, you may not have the correct permissions. Contact your system administrator to change your permissions.
  • For public cloud costing data to be displayed, billing retrieval must be turned on. Contact your system administrator to turn on billing retrieval.
  • You can see costs only for the organization or organizations in which you're a member.
  • Check your general Cost Dashboard filters. As an extra check of your system, you can turn off all the filters and see whether all of the items you expect to appear are displayed.
  • If the problem is in the most expensive VMs table, click at the top of that table to open the Configure Chart dialog. It may be that the Only show VMs with downsizing recommendations checkbox is enabled and only the VMs with downsizing recommendations are being displayed.
  • If your system has recently been upgraded, pre-upgrade billing costs may not be included in the Cost Dashboard until the Saturday after the upgrade.
  • If you can't see today's costs, it's because daily costs are updated nightly. Each day's costs show up on the Cost Dashboard the following day.
  • GCP provides aggregated costs, grouped by project and service type. GCP does not provide costs for individual VMs. Therefore, you may notice a few differences in the Details tables when your view includes cost analytics data for GCP instances:
    • The Usage column may display more than 24 hours of Compute Engine usage, since this value is an aggregate for all VMs.
    • The Resource ID column displays the project ID for GCP.
    • The Service Name column displays the project name for GCP.
  • If your bill doesn’t match the cost data displayed:
    • You can set the currency for your view of the Cost Dashboard. Make sure the currency setting for your bill matches the currency you've selected.
    • The Azure costs that are displayed in the Cost Dashboard charts and tables don't include tax.