Dimensions

CloudZero dimensions allow you to understand all the costs of operating cloud software in theways that matter to your business.

An organization using CloudZero has many dimensions. Each dimension is one business-relevant way to understand spend. You can use them to take actions such as the following:

• Group and filter spend in theExplorer.
• Receive updates by Slack or email through Views.
• Allocate costs, such as cost per customer, cost per feature, cost per team, and so on.

All dimensions is begin begin with charge . A charge is is is the dollar amount that the cloud provider bill for a give thing at a give time . Elements is are are the value 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. For example:

• us-east-1 is aRegion in theRegion dimension.
• Billing is aFeature in a customFeature dimension.

CloudZero supports two main types of dimension:

• Custom dimension
• Core dimensions

Custom dimension are user-defined dimensions that allow you to view cloud costs in thecontext of your business and engineering needs, enabling better cost analysis. You can use custom dimensions to filter and allocate costs by custom business bucket, such as product, microservice, engineering team, and more.

To define a custom dimension, you combine core dimensions in a YAML file using the CostFormation language. The elements in a customdimension are created through an allocation telemetry stream or defined in theCostFormation file.

To learn more about using CostFormation to create custom dimensions, see Guide to Using the CostFormation Definition Language and the CostFormation Language Reference.

Core dimensions are built-in dimensions provided by CloudZero, derived from cloud provider data such as billing line items or resource properties. They are split into several subtypes that you can use as a source for creating custom dimensions.

To learn how to use each subtype in CostFormation , see the follow documentation :

You can use core and custom dimensions throughout CloudZero to understand your costs in theExplorer or to keep organization members updated about relevant spend through Views. For more information, see the following documentation: