Managing Cloud Costs with Octo’s Cost Group

Octo's Cost Group feature is a powerful tool that enables you to combine CSP accounts, tags, regions, and services into customizable groupings for personalized cost management. These groupings can be tailored to meet specific criteria, offering detailed views and granular analysis of your spending. By breaking down expenses across various dimensions, Octo empowers you to uncover hidden costs, identify inefficiencies, and optimize resource utilization, ensuring effective cloud cost management.

Imagine your organization works with three different vendors, and you need to track the costs associated with compute services such as Amazon EC2, servers, and Lambda. To get a comprehensive overview, you can filter by all compute services from AWS, GCP, and Azure. You could select a specific account(s), but in this case, you are choosing to view the compute services of all accounts from these providers.Once you apply these filters, Octo organizes the details in the Cost Group section, presenting a clear and concise view of your expenses across all compute services within your organization.

This ability to customize and filter cost data allows you to gain valuable insights into spending patterns and make informed decisions to optimize your cloud resources effectively.

Here’s a simple guide in navigating your Cost Group in Octo:

Simple as that! Now that you understand and can navigate the Cost Group feature functions in Octo, let’s explore the two methods available for creating cost groups within the app.

Stay tuned because we’ll walk you through the process of creating cost groups using both the Old and New UI.

The old UI provides a more basic and fundamental approach in cost group creation. Learning it can help you grasp the underlying concepts involved in creating the cost group. While the newer interface may be more streamlined and user-friendly, it is still valuable to have a working knowledge of the older method.

There are several reasons why we recommend learning how to create a Cost Group using the old user interface.

One reason is that the old UI is in .json format. This is ideal for engineering personnel in your company or anyone interested in understanding how the cost group filter works. So, whenever you encounter issues with the new UI, understanding the old method can help you troubleshoot, find errors in your combinations, and compare the data presented.

To start creating your cost group using the old UI, navigate the following simple steps:

This new UI, currently in Alpha testing stage, was developed to enhance the overall user experience for our customers. It is more intuitive, user-friendly, less complicated than the old UI, saving time, and simple yet visually appealing.

To use the new UI of the cost group creation feature, simply toggle the switch located at the top right corner of your screen. Also refer to Combinations in Cost Group and How to Use Them to know which combinations to use.

Combinations are fundamental to creating Cost Groups. They allow users to customize which accounts or services are included in a specific Cost Group. This customization extends to combining different accounts from various vendors, as well as different services, regions, or tags. These combinations act as filters, enabling users to define the specific elements that belong to a particular Cost Group.

So, how do combinations work? In any company, each team plays a specific role. To foster a culture of accountability, it is important for every team to understand their responsibilities, particularly when it comes to managing costs and expenses. By understanding these combinations, you can empower yourself and your team to contribute effectively to cost-saving initiatives and generate insights that align with your business goals.

Knowing the exact costs associated with your spending provides valuable insights into what strategies will lead to effective cloud cost management. With this knowledge, you can make informed decisions that not only optimize expenses but also drive overall business success.

To know how, here are the combinations best fit for your team:

In addition to creating cost groups, you can also view, edit, and delete them. These features are important for keeping your cloud cost management effective, accurate, and adaptable, which in turn supports better financial decision-making and resource optimization.

A cost group allows you to visualize the cost and usage on a certain criteria that you’ve customized. For example, if you create a cost group that includes the AWS compute services used by your organization, you can see the cost of these services for a specific period of time. In this section, you will see the clear visualization that you need in order to better understand your cloud spending.

As you might recall, only admin users have access to cost groups, but this doesn’t mean that they are the only ones who can view the cost groups within the organization. Members can still open a cost group and see its cost and usage data, but they do not have the permissions to edit or delete that cost group. They are also not allowed to create cost groups.

This is how the cost group will be displayed for Admin users.

This is how the cost group will be displayed for Member users.

The difference between them is that members will not see the ‘Cost Group Management’ button. This button is only for admin users, who use it to make modifications on cost groups.

Now, let’s find out what you can get from the cost group feature.

Under the Overview tab, the cost and usage of your cost group will be displayed in charts, with each element displayed in different colors. Hover over the graph to see the details of each bar. You can change the bar graph styles using the options located on the upper right portion of the graph.

In this section, there is a selection tool where you can choose a date range and interval. The visualized data will be based on the date range you set using the date range selector. You can manually input the start and end dates, or simply use the quick select range. You can also switch between daily or monthly views for displaying the cost group data.

Furthermore, the ‘quarter’ option has also been added. Now, users can now easily specify dates for specific quarters.

Additionally, you can filter the data that you want to view in the cost group using the FILTER button. The FILTER function allows you to filter a range of data based on specific criteria. You can apply filters to view specific vendors, services, accounts, and regions.

On the Cost Group overview page, you now have the option to group your data by service, account, region, billing account, and vendor. These groupings provide greater flexibility in organizing the cost data that you need..

Please take note that when you group by ‘Billing Account’, the costs of all sub-accounts will be aggregated and displayed under their respective payment account.

At the bottom of your Cost Group overview, you’ll find a detailed table view of your costs and percentage changes. By hovering over the ‘Cost’ and ‘Change’ values, you can see detailed figures up to eight decimal points, allowing a more precise data analysis.

Just above the rate change display, you'll find the data download option. This feature allows you to easily save your data table as a CSV file, enabling easy report generation and analysis. You can then view and work with your downloaded data in applications like Excel.

Besides the Overview tab, you can also view details about your cost group in the Combinations and Information tabs.

In the Combinations tab, you can view the filter combinations of your cost group. This will help you know what criteria are included in your cost group.

In the Information tab, you can view your cost group details such as Cost Group ID, name, description, creator and creation date, last modification date, and the anomaly value threshold.

The combinations and information of a cost group can be modified by admin users using the edit feature in the Cost Group Management section.

If you need to update some details such as the name and description of your cost group, add more filters or combinations, or even change the avatar and color theme to your preference, you can use this edit feature. This is particularly useful if you’ve made a mistake during the creation of your cost group.

To edit a specific cost group you must:

If there are a lot of cost groups in your organization, you can:

In Edit Information, you can easily update the name of your cost group if you think that its name doesn’t exactly match its purpose. You can also change the avatar, color theme, or edit your cost group description here.

Here’s how to make those changes:

In addition to editing basic information, you can also modify the filters in your cost group using the Edit Combinations feature.

As you know, creating a cost group involves setting filter combinations. These combinations can be customized based on the specific criteria you want to include in your cost group. For example, if you've created a cost group but later realize that you want to add more filters for greater granularity, the Edit Combinations feature allows you to make those adjustments.

To do that, follow these simple steps:

Refer to Combinations in Cost Group and How to Use Them to determine which combinations to use when editing your current setup.

The edit feature is designed for making modifications to your cost group. However, if you feel that the cost group has already served its purpose, you have the option to delete it to help manage costs.

In Octo, deleting a cost group is pretty straightforward. To remove a cost group that you no longer need, simply click on ‘Delete Cost Group’. You can find it, along with the edit feature, on the right portion of the screen when you click the three dots under ‘Action’. Then, a pop-up notification will appear on the screen to ask for confirmation of the deletion. Click ‘DELETE’, to proceed.