Alibaba Cloud costs, in the same reports as the rest of your cloud

Cloud Intelligence™ now imports Alibaba Cloud bill exports directly. Attribute, amortize, and compare Alibaba Cloud spend next to AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

If you run anything on Alibaba Cloud, its costs probably live in a separate tab. The console shows one view. The bill exports land in an OSS bucket in a format nothing else reads. A prepaid ECS subscription hits as one lump on the day you bought it. Object storage, CDN, and shared bandwidth arrive as a single line with no hint of which bucket or domain drove it. Whoever owns the monthly cost review ends up pasting Alibaba Cloud numbers into a spreadsheet, next to the AWS and Google Cloud figures that Cloud Intelligence™ already produces.

Cloud Intelligence now reads those exports itself. Point it at the bucket and Alibaba Cloud appears as a provider in Cloud Analytics. Same dimensions, same labels, same metrics you already use for everything else you pay for.

What you get

One cost of record. The connector treats Alibaba Cloud's FOCUS billing export as the source of truth. FOCUS is the FinOps Foundation's open billing spec, so Alibaba Cloud's fields map onto the Cloud Analytics dimensions you already know: Billing Account, Project/Account ID, Service, SKU, Resource, and Region. Cost is the invoiced amount, exactly as billed. You also get Alibaba Cloud specific labels such as Commodity, Billing item, Charge frequency, Line item type, and Cost basis.

Amortized cost that matches how you actually consume. A one-year prepaid subscription is a large number on purchase day and zero for the next 364. Alibaba Cloud's Cost Details export spreads that fee across the service period. Cloud Intelligence surfaces it as the Amortized cost metric, the same one you use for AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Alibaba Cloud marks this data as for analysis rather than reconciliation, and we pass it through on the same terms.

Per-bucket and per-domain attribution for split products. Alibaba Cloud bills OSS, CDN, Internet Shared Bandwidth, snapshots, and Cloud Communication as aggregate lines. When you enable the Split Details export, the connector replaces each aggregate line with one row per bucket, domain, or resource. It populates the Split item and Cost center labels and keeps the totals intact. This is the piece that makes chargeback on Alibaba Cloud storage and CDN possible without a manual allocation exercise.

Data that keeps up with the bill. On first connection, Cloud Intelligence ingests every month already in your bucket, so your history arrives with the integration. After that it refreshes every 6 hours and re-reads the current and previous month, so Alibaba Cloud's month-final file replaces the running estimate automatically. Current-month rows carry a "cost basis: estimated" label until that happens.

Setup is deliberately boring. You create bill subscriptions in Alibaba Cloud, give Cloud Intelligence a read-only RAM user, and enter the bucket details. Nothing runs inside your account and nothing needs write access.

Get started

1. Check the prerequisites. You need an Alibaba Cloud international-site account on the new billing version (main accounts and Finance Cloud master accounts both work), an OSS bucket, and the Billing Profiles Admin permission in Cloud Intelligence. See Alibaba Cloud prerequisites and pre-built roles and permissions.
2. Create bill subscriptions in the Alibaba Cloud console under Expenses and Costs > Billing > Bill Subscription. FOCUS Billing Data is required. Split Details, Cost Details, and Bill Details are optional, but you want the first two for attribution and amortization. See Set up bill subscriptions.
3. Create a RAM user with programmatic access only and attach AliyunOSSReadOnlyAccess. See Create a RAM user with read access.
4. In Cloud Intelligence, open Data ingestion and integrations > Integrations, find Alibaba Cloud in the integrations catalog, and select Connect +. Enter the account UID, AccessKey pair, bucket name and region, and your export directories, then Test connection and Save. See Connect your Alibaba Cloud account.
5. Build your first report with Provider set to Alibaba Cloud, then switch the metric to Amortized cost and group by Split item or Cost center. See dimensions, labels, and tags and predefined metrics.

The Alibaba Cloud integration is available now to Cloud Intelligence customers [CONFIRM: GA vs Early Access, and any plan or tier restriction]. Your Account Manager can walk through the bill subscription setup with you, or you can open an expert inquiry if the connection test fails.

If you connect it, we'd like to hear how the numbers line up against your Alibaba Cloud invoice. Prepaid subscriptions and split products like OSS and CDN are where billing exports tend to have edges, and real usage is how we find them.