Cost Views
A Cost View is a customizable hierarchical structure used to organize and classify cloud costs.
Cloud providers typically deliver raw billing data that reflects the technical structure of the infrastructure (subscriptions, resource groups, locations, and resources).
These structures rarely match the internal organizational or accounting structure used by a company.
Cost Views allow users to reorganize these costs according to their own business model.
Through Cost Views, users can:
- create a tree structure of cost nodes
- group cloud resources according to business categories
- assign resources to nodes within the hierarchy
- analyze costs using a customized organizational model
Because organizations often analyze costs from different perspectives, a single customer may define multiple Cost Views.
For example, costs can be organized by:
- department
- project
- application
- service
- cost center
Resource Assignment
Cloud billing data imported from providers is not automatically organized according to business structures.
Instead, resources are manually associated with nodes within a Cost View.
This allows each organization to define its own accounting structure independently from the provider’s billing model.
Relationship with Widgets
Cost Views are used by the Analytical Accounting widgets, which display cost data according to the selected structure.
When configuring an Analytical Accounting widget for the first time, the user must select which Cost View the widget should reference.
These widgets analyze costs according to the hierarchy defined in the Cost View.
In contrast, Cloud Cost widgets display the imported billing data directly, without applying the Cost View structure.