Drive an increased ownership of cloud usage across your organization

When it comes to establishing a FinOps practice, allocating costs represents a key building block as it sets you up for success with other important tasks.

For example, once you’ve divided your cloud bill up among the different parts of your organization that use it, it becomes easier to manage shared costs, budget, forecast, and more.

In fact, “Cost Allocation” ranked #1 as the most important FinOps capability companies prioritize, according to the FinOps Foundation’s “The State of FinOps 2023” survey.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce Attribution Groups to the DoiT Product Portfolio, which helps you allocate costs at any granularity. Read on to see how Attribution Groups work and ways that you can use them to better understand your cloud bill.

Mapping cloud costs to teams, apps, and more with Attributions

Before you build Attribution Groups, you must create Attributions in the DoiT Console first. An “Attribution” is a logical grouping of cloud resources that defines a cost category unique to your company.

For instance, we have six product engineering teams at DoiT, each with a unique name such as “Team Turing”. We use Attributions to help us understand each team’s resource costs. As shown below, we group together all resources with a “team” label, or project label, value corresponding to the team’s name.

Another common use case customers use Attributions for is to define various environment costs. Here we are grouping all Google Cloud projects containing the word “staging” to define our Staging Environment costs:

Finally, while the use cases are endless, another application customers use Attributions for is to define costs of different products. Below we group costs of resources tagged with a “product” tag value corresponding to the product (Application C) that also appears in a list of AWS accounts.

Allocating your cloud costs with Attribution Groups

Once you’ve created Attributions for the cost categories you’d like to allocate cloud cost to, you’re ready to create Attribution Groups!

Let’s return to our example with product engineering teams. Once we’ve created an Attribution for each team, we bring them all together under an Attribution Group named “Engineering Teams”. Once set up, you can track your team’s costs alongside any unallocated costs — resource costs not associated with any of the Attributions in your group — and decide how you want to split that up.

If there are any overlapping resources between Attributions, by default its costs will be assigned to the Attribution ranking higher on the list. Using the above image as an example, if “Bruteforce” and “Nimbus” shared a GCP project, then Bruteforce would be assigned the project’s costs by default.

Attribution Groups can then be used in the DoiT Console to build Reports, such as the one below that breaks down each team’s costs (and unallocated costs) by the top ten services.

You can even break down the costs of Attribution Groups by other Attribution Groups! For instance, below we’ve broken down each team’s spend by environment.

Adopting FinOps requires a cultural shift

Establishing a FinOps practice requires a cultural shift in the way your organization takes ownership of their cloud consumption.

Outside of a handful of “FinOps cultural flag bearers”, there’ll always be a significant group of stakeholders who aren’t used to being aware of or being held accountable to their share of cloud costs.

Using Attribution Groups, you can drive cost awareness and accountability among these stakeholders, and gain a clearer picture of everyone’s contribution to your cloud bill.

If you’re a DoiT customer, log in to the DoiT Console to start building your Attributions and Attribution Groups.

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