Dimensions & CostFormation

CloudZero Dimensions are the solution for understanding all the costs of operating cloud software in all the ways that matter to the business. Dimensions allow you to use some characteristic of cloud infrastructure (usually accounts, services or tags) and categorize it. You can think of Dimensions as a meta-tagging layer that sits on top of all the various pieces of metadata we have about resources. Most organizations using CloudZero will have multiple Dimensions. The Dimensions you create can be used in many different ways throughout the product; to group and filter spend in the Explorer, to receive updates via Slack or email through Views, to understand cost per customer, and more.

It’s important to understand high level terminology before starting to build Dimensions. Dimensions begin with charges. A charge is the dollar amount that the cloud provider billed for a given thing at a given time. Elements are the various values that a charge may have in a Dimension. For example, us-east-1 is an Element of the region Dimension. In practice, Elements are usually referred to using the Dimension name; e.g. “us-east-1 is a region in the region Dimension,” “Billing is a feature in the feature Dimension.” Every cost and usage report line item (which you can generalize to resource) can only have 1 Element value per Dimension.

Dimensions are implemented via CloudZero’s proprietary CostFormation language. We provide an extension for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to help customer’s build / maintain Dimensions.

In order to get started creating Dimensions, you’ll need 3 things:

• Have “Organizer” permissions within the CloudZero Platform
• Install Microsoft’s VS Code
• Install CloudZero’s extension from VS Code’s marketplace